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tel:/sip: URL handler for snom SIP phones

I was thinking the other day that it’d be great if you could click on a link to a tel: or sip: and have your phone dial the number. In my office, I have a snom VOIP telephone, which has an integrated web server that you can use to, amongst other things, dial numbers… which started me thinking.

URL handlers have received a lot of (adverse) publicity recently on Mac OS X, because they have been the subject of a number of security flaws, but they are absolutely perfect for this sort of application. It turns-out that it’s quite easy to write one, too.

Anyway, I thought the results might be useful to more than just me, so please feel free to download my snomURLHandler application, which is a Status Item (that is, one of those icons at the top right of your screen). It’s very basic, but quite useful I think, and also allows you to dial a number from AppleScript by writing something like

tell application snomURLHandler
  dial "<some phone number>"
end tell

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Hi Alistair,
At last, an application for the mac to work with the snom phone system. It's amazed me how little I can find on the web about snom phones and external applications for them.
We installed a snom proxy about a month ago and are running 15 phones + 3 ATAs on it. At the moment we are on phase one - going out on to the PSTN via a Vega Stream, but once things settle down we are going to phase 2 and ripping out our 8 ISDN lines and going totally VOIP.
How have you found the Snoms? We've had a few teething problems, the strangest one being that very occasionally we'd get no voice/sound when dialling externally. No matter how many times we'd reset the phone/proxy/vega the phone would still be silent when dialing out - yet internally and with external calls coming in it would be fine.
We think we've sorted out now - turning off the NAT detection in the advance html menu.
Anyway enough of that - are you working on anything else mac/snom related?
I've written a few scripts for dialling from the mac - via the address book and filemaker.
The latest script i've written, thanks to the new On Action URL feature is to knock the volume down in iTunes when the phone rings or the handset is lifted, pumping it back up once the call is finished. Simple, but effective.
Now, if only you could pass variables, such as the caller id number via the On Action page....
Keep up the good work and look forward to seeing what you develop next.
Cheers
Rik

My experiences with the phone have been good; I think VOIP still has a way to go before it becomes really mainstream (for instance, NATs still cause complications of one sort or another, although snom seem to be one of the best manufacturers for NAT support).

As for the NAT settings in the phone, I was told that one or two of the options no longer work in the newer releases of the software, because of changes to the specifications (for instance, manually specifying a STUN server apparently doesn't work any more, because the phone always tries to find an SRV record in the DNS). The reason I mention it is that the symptoms you mention sound quite similar to the problems I was having when I was trying to manually configure a STUN server.

On the Mac/snom integration front, I did talk to one of the guys at snom about adding support for external address book integration… I think it's a bit early yet, but they did hint that they might add SyncML support, which would be pretty cool.

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