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