Soonr for Mac = One Happy PhoneBoy
As promised, the folks from Soonr have released Soonr for Mac OS 10.4. It is now available on their site for download. And while the basic functionality–integration with Skype–works as I expect on the Mac, the desktop integration piece is not 100% “there” yet.
In addition to allowing you to chat with your Skype buddies as well as “call” them from your mobile phone (basically, the Soonr desktop agent sets up a conference call between your mobile phone and the Skype friend–or lets you make another SkypeOut call), Soonr also allows you to access files in certain folders in your system. You can choose which ones are made available to you. You can also utilize Mac OS X’s “Spotlight” feature to find files outside of your shared folders. You can protect access to these files with a password.
The cool thing is that this “remote access” can happen not only over a web-enabled mobile phone, but basically “any” web browser. So now in addition to running Skype on your corporate laptop, you have access to your documents from anywhere. Kind of cool, but when I put my security googles on, this has “Danger Will Robinson” written all over it.
A few flaws I’ve noticed initially: If a contact is surrounded in <>‘s (one of my contacts is for some reason), then Soonr won’t correctly display the contact name. It basically prints it “as is.” Come to think of it, that creates, among other things, a potential cross-site security risk. It should be straightforward to “translate” characters that might get translated as HTML into something harmless.
One thing about the remote file access: the agent isn’t very good at scanning the shared folder for updates. So, for example, if I go into my documents folder and create a new file, I can’t immediately go to Soonr on my mobile phone to see if the file is available. Not sure how often it updates, but clearly that is an issue. I also cannot seem to make an SMB mounted filesystem available via Soonr as well. Sure, it allowed me to “select” the mounted filesystem as a shared folder, but I can’t access it via Soonr. These issues are probably related.
Anyway, just having the ability to access my Mac-based Skype from my Nokia E70 is damn cool.
