Module Global Shortcuts

Description: Most instant messaging clients (Kopete, The AOL ICQ client, Sim and others) register global shortcuts with the operating system (or more precisely the desktop environment). Such global shortcuts allow the user to execute to reference the instant messaging client even if another application is currently active.

Here are some examples:

When a new message arrives, an instant messaging client would not immediately open it. It would instead notify the user about the new event by either playing a sound, blinking a systray icon or popping up a notification bubble. When the user is ready to view the message they could do so by using the Ctrl+Shift+I key combination.

Another widely used key combo for IM applications is Ctrl+Shift+A. This combination would hide or show the contact list thus allowing a user to select a contact and initiate a conversation by only using the keboard, which turns out to be quie appreciated by some users (… like me :) ).

The purpose of this project would be to implement support for these shortcus in the SIP Communicator. Needless to say the result needs to work on Linux (both KDE and GNOME), Microsoft Windows, and Mac OS X.

It is very possible that it would require writing some native code that would actually register that hooks with the operating system.

References:

Other SIP Communicator GSoC Projects
http://gsoc.sip-communicator.org

SIP Communicator Developer Documentation
http://www.sip-communicator.org/index.php/Documentation/DeveloperDocumentation

The official SIP Communicator website
http://www.sip-communicator.org