a good day (despite being so tired)
Today was great! My new Adobe upgrades came in today, so since this afternoon I’ve been using Photoshop CS!*that’s what they decided to call version 8.0, because of their new strategy of bundling everything into a “Creative Suite” From what I can tell, it’s a really good upgrade. I’m mostly pleased about the new productivity features. Especially with my workload, anything that will help me work faster is good.
I also got a book in the mail today — I ordered it about three weeks ago, but didn’t rush the shipment at all. It’s nothing I’m able to get to at the moment, but I’ve only seen this book for $60 before, and I found a used one for $10 so I pounced. It’s called Mapi, Sapi, and Tapi: Developer’s Guide. What are Mapi, Sapi, and Tapi? Well, ‘API’ stands for “advanced programmers interface” or “accessible programmable interface” or something like that. It’s basically a set of method that enable you to program with a third-party code package. Mapi, Sapi, and Tapi are Microsoft APIs: “Messaging” api, “Speech” api, and “Telephony” api. I bought this book for the TAPI reference.
TAPI is one of those things that Microsoft has made this great big package for — but there is very little documentation on it. Whenever I get a chance to get back into programming, I’ve moved all of my other programming plans aside for this one little idea that I’m going to use for my business. I’m going to write an answering machine service (via modem) that will be able to sort callers based on caller-ID into specific messages. Each class of user can have certain rules applied to the message.
The problem I’m trying to solve is that all of my client use our home phone line for business. Granted, it’s hundreds of times better than using the cell phone (which doesn’t pick up very well here, leading to lots of “what did you say?”s and “can you repeat that?”s), but it’s still a pain, especially when clients call before- or after-hours. I am ‘available’ for business between 10am and 6pm. Outside of that, I don’t want to talk to clients. But if they call, I still have to answer or else just let the phone ring (which I hate).
So I will be able to save my client’s Caller-ID signatures, and create a rule saying that if they call outside of business hours, or on the weekend, then they automatically get a machine. I don’t know how soon the Caller-ID information can be picked up, but I’m hoping that I can get it so that the house phones won’t even ring if a client is being routed into the machine. That would be so nice.