Preso

Tonight I will be talking about Ribbit for the PDXRIA group over in Portland. If you are in the area stop by and say hi!

This is my first "official" presentation for another group so I am a little nervous. Hopefully it will go OK!

The weather forecast is mostly wind, wind, and more wind. Fortunately it looks like the snow level is rising (to about 8000 feet) so I am hoping to avoid driving home in snow and ice!

Ribbit - Simplicity!

I am working on incorporating some of the Ribbit functionality into a Flex application built for work. At the most basic level - it's a contact management solution sort of like GoldMine, but with a lot of custom reporting and organizational "goodies".

I loveloveLOVE how simple it has been to add the Ribbit functions to this app. In a matter of hours, I was able to update the application to enable the user to click on any contact and place a call from their computer, without re-dialing.

It was similarly easy to log the user into the Ribbit system in the background - which means the app still loads and they can work while Ribbit does it's thing. (To be fair, we have a pretty slow connection to the Internet here in the office - so I think it's an "us" thing and not a Ribbit issue!) Once the session is connected I have it setup to simply change the status and enable all the form items. Basically... like this:






This weekend I will try to make a screencast demo of the functions I have integrated so far so you can see how it works. Stay tuned!

Ribbit - Getting started

I've had some time to play with Ribbit, and it's pretty cool. I used the sample apps provided to place and receive a couple of test calls, and also play with the messaging features.

I like that every time someone leaves me a voicemail message, Ribbit sends me an email with the caller ID, length of the message, and a text transcription of the message.
If the caller is someone in my Ribbit contacts list, it provides me with lots of other information including a picture or "avatar" of the caller, depending on what I have set up.

And that's just the beginning. There's a wealth of other information that I can access in the Ribbit database... I am just looking at the tip of the iceberg still!

Want to help me out? Leave me a comment and I will send you my Ribbit phone number so you can give me a call! ;)

Ribbit

I am so excited that I have been accepted as a prerelease developer for the new Ribbit component for Flex!

In a nutshell:

The Ribbit Phone Component will give Rich internet application developers the ability to make and receive calls, record/send and receive voicemail, as well as add and manage contacts.

Lots of good ideas are percolating on potential applications for this component. I am going to start by tying in some of the Ribbit functionality with our internal (and proprietary) contact management application. Which (of course) was built using Flex!