HELP! where did the dialing prefs go?

[John Chamberlain]

Just recently upgraded to OS X (10.2.8), and from FMP 5 to 5.5. Now I cannot find the Dialing preferences setting. Where did they put it?

Version: v5.x

Platform: Mac OS X Jaguar

[CyborgSam]

Dial Phone is not supported in Mac OS X. I just checked FM7 and it is still not supported.

I forget the details, but there is a UNIX reason why the modem device cannot be used by a user application.

Can anyone elaborate?

[John Chamberlain]

That's really a bummer. What do all the Mac people that use FMP as a contact data base do now?

[Tulma]

I heard that there is an apple script which has been devised to deal with the no Dial Phone problem in FM7. Has anyone come across this?

Tulma

[comment]

> there is a UNIX reason why the modem device cannot be used by a user application

There's a shareware app that can do it. FMI should be ashamed, and so should be Apple.

[Tulma]

Thanks to the enthusiast for the lead to Dial Lite. Worked fine manually - entering name and phone number and pressing the button - just had to remember to include the outside line access number in each number.

Has anyone tried to somehow embed Dial Lite into Filemaker 7 as some kind of pop up or somehow exported a number to Dial Lite so that the number can be automatically sent to Dial Lite without having to key the number into Dial Lite?

Still hoping for a neat work around.

Tulma

[comment]

I am glad if it helps you, but all I meant to say was - if a $3 shareware can do it, why can't Filemaker?

[Fenton]

This one is a bit more, $12, but it seems to do a lot, with lots of phones. It is AppleScript Studio based,* so would probably be fairly easy to integrate with FileMaker; in fact he includes a FileMaker example file.

http://homepage.mac.com/jonn8/jpt/

*Which means there's considerable support for phone dialing within OS X itself. FileMaker just doesn't use it.

I also have some text describing a free AppleScript solution; but I have no idea whether it works, nor who wrote it. I do phones manually.

The OS X version of FileMaker Pro does not support the dial function (who knows why).

Creating an dialing function from FileMaker Pro running OS X

1) Go to Network preference panel. Select Active Network Ports from the Show drop-down menu.

2) Click on Internal Modem and then click on Duplicate. Rename to Telephone

3) Click the check box on Telephone to make it an active port

4) Go to FMP. Select ScriptMaker from Scripts menu. Click on Create

5) Clear all predefined actions in the script window.

6) Double click the Copy function from the list on the left. Check the Select Entire Contents box at the bottom of the window and then Check and Click Specify field to select the field with the phone number you want to dial.

7) Double click the Perform AppleScript function from the list on the left. Click Specify at the bottom of the box and then, when the window opens, click Script Text button and past the following into the window.

local thenumber

tell application "Finder"

activate

copy (the clipboard) to thenumber

end tell

copy "*67,1-" & thenumber to thenumber

tell application "FileMaker Pro"

activate

ignoring application responses

tell application "Internet Connect" to connect configuration "Telephone"

to telephone number thenumber

end ignoring

display dialog thenumber & return & "Dialing in Progress: Disconnect?" buttons {"Disconnect"} default button 1 giving up after 10

tell application "Internet Connect" to disconnect configuration

"Telephone"

end tell

Note: If you want to eliminate or modify the prefix of the number to be dialed that is in the selected field, change the "*67,1-" & in the copy "*67,1-" & thenumber to thenumber line. It is currently set up to block caller ID and add a 1- in front of the number in the data field.

[comment]

Thanks for the pointers. I will definitively explore the AppleScript option, when I have more time.