RIP Skype API

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

1. I sometimes need to write code that works differently on different machine types (here’s a more detailed discussion about that), and
2. 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.