I’m doing a little cleaning in the icanhaz code repository. One of the things I’m throwing out is the code to connect different machines to the Skype API (below):
import os import Skype4Py if os.name == "nt": print("Windows") #32 bit and 64 bit windows behave differently with Skype if 'PROGRAMFILES(X85)' in os.environ: sconn = Skype4Py.Skype() #64-bit else: sconn = Skype4Py.Skype() #32-bit elif os.name == "os2": print("Mac") sconn = Skype4Py.Skype() else: print("Linux machine or similar") sconn = Skype4Py.Skype(Transport='x11') #Now go do the usual Skype API things.
I’m leaving the code here because
- I sometimes need to write code that works differently on different machine types (here’s a more detailed discussion about that), and
- One day Skype might recant their somewhat strange decision to shut down their API to more than a handful of developers.
What Skype’s API decision means in practice is that anyone wanting to search a Skypechat for an interesting set of words, or scrape urls out of it, or even know who made which comments when, has to now do that with cut-and-paste and hoping that people don’t change their nicknames halfway through a chat, instead of automating those processes. Which when you’re halfway through a sudden onset disaster can be a bit of a pain.