Today's conference activity
Posted: Sun Oct 02, 2016 9:07 pm
Today, during conference, I decided to prototype something that my father in law has been asking me for. He serves in a university student stake, where there is a lot of turnover. He is always getting phone calls from new members of his stake, and was wondering if there was a way for LDS tools to automatically update his address book in bulk (and stay in sync).
With that thought in mind, I actually wrote up a quick CallKit Caller Identification Extension that would register the phone numbers for those members of his stake from the LDS tools directory. It worked beautifully as a prototype - unknown phone numbers would be looked up whenever a call came in. It was very straightforward to do.
I only mention it because I think it would be a really cool feature to include with LDS Tools - a CallKit caller ID extension. My solution relied upon sniffing the directory update from LDS Tools using a MITM proxy and then bulk importing it into a one-off developer app (which is not practical, updatable, or even allowed...hence my referring to it as a "prototype"). More than anything, it was a diversion to satisfy my own curiosity as to whether or not it would be possible - but it ended up being not only much easier to implement than I had originally expected, but it also seemed (at first glance) to be something that would be useful in day-to-day use.
I just thought I'd throw out the idea, in case it might be implemented in a future version of LDS Tools. I have since deleted and removed my prototype from my laptop and my phone - as it wasn't really usable in its current state, and I understand that only the official apps are to use the directory API. However, if the developers would like some pointers or help implementing it officially, I'm willing to help where I can.
With that thought in mind, I actually wrote up a quick CallKit Caller Identification Extension that would register the phone numbers for those members of his stake from the LDS tools directory. It worked beautifully as a prototype - unknown phone numbers would be looked up whenever a call came in. It was very straightforward to do.
I only mention it because I think it would be a really cool feature to include with LDS Tools - a CallKit caller ID extension. My solution relied upon sniffing the directory update from LDS Tools using a MITM proxy and then bulk importing it into a one-off developer app (which is not practical, updatable, or even allowed...hence my referring to it as a "prototype"). More than anything, it was a diversion to satisfy my own curiosity as to whether or not it would be possible - but it ended up being not only much easier to implement than I had originally expected, but it also seemed (at first glance) to be something that would be useful in day-to-day use.
I just thought I'd throw out the idea, in case it might be implemented in a future version of LDS Tools. I have since deleted and removed my prototype from my laptop and my phone - as it wasn't really usable in its current state, and I understand that only the official apps are to use the directory API. However, if the developers would like some pointers or help implementing it officially, I'm willing to help where I can.