A Simple Approach to a Google Voice Dashboard
I got my Google Voice account little over 3 weeks ago. I have been reading up on the various features, got real excited about all the cool things one can do with the GV account. I was pretty close to buying an iPhone app and then the last weeks mess of the App Store removal of the existing GV apps and rejection of the Google's GV app. Definitely was little dissapointed but not terribly concerned. Google Voice mobile web app is not bad and there is a neat little bookmarklet that can act as a speed dial for a contact. I do hope that Apple turns around and allows the iPhone GV apps.
So this got my thinking so what are the GV tools available for a desktop, it would be cool to have a dashboard or a mac widgets to simply click and have them it call me and my contact. In fact this is one thing that always bugged me at my work. We use Cisco VOIP solution, however our internal address book and this VOIP solution is not connected. What I mean is when I click on the contact number, I would like it to connect me and my internal contact via the handset. Unfortunately this was not available. There were options to add contacts to the phones address book, search the directory from the phone etc but none of these were what I was looking for. After little googling around guess what I ran into ? A firefox add-on for Google Voice. This add-on is from @chadsmith Here is how it works, get the firefox add from here , install, restart firefox. Setup the add-on preferences:
Once this is done, the add-on recognizes a phone number on any website that you visit in firefox and lets you click on the number which automatically will call that number and your forwarding number. Voila! Now one of my requirements is covered. When I search for an employee in our internal address book/directory, i click on it and the add-on is configured at work to forward to my work number (and my personal computer at home is configured to call my cell phone).
So onto my next requirement of a simple dashboard to call my contacts (friends, family and few of my frequently called colleagues). You can actually go into your google voice account/contacts section and call from there. However, its not an elegant solution, not a dashboard I am looking for. So here is what I did, I exported my google contacts (only specific groups) to a CSV format, opened it in MS Excel, removed all the columns except for name and number and saved it in web page format, edited it in Textpad to remove all the MS specific entries in the file and added it to my netvibes account. In netvibes, I created a new tab for my google voice dashboard and I created one HTML widget per contact group. Here is a sample of how it looks. Now with the firefox add-on, i click on any contact number and I am on the call!
There are other ways to do this to, you can export the contacts list in a Tab delimited format, upload to google docs and open that doc in firefox, all the numbers will be clickable. You can also email that doc content and put it in a seperate folder/label and that entire list will be clickable. Until I find better alternatives for this or Google Voice natively provides such contact list dashboard, I am going to use the netvibes tab as my Google Voice Dashboard.
I am still trying few things to better way to get such a dashboard on my iPhone until I find I will be using the google voice mobile page.
