Inside Macintosh: Telephony /

Preface - About This Book

This book, Inside Macintosh: Telephony, describes the Telephone Manager, the part of the Macintosh system software that you can use to develop applications and other software that provide telephony capabilities (that is, capabilities that allow you to manage telephones, and in particular to establish or control connections between telephones on a telephone network). You can use the Telephone Manager to develop a wide range of applications, including screen-based telephone dialers, computer-based answering-machines, call forwarders, and so forth.

This book describes the application programming interfaces that you can use to develop applications and other software using the Telephone Manager. It also describes how to write telephone tools, which provide the interface between network switching hardware and the Telephone Manager.

To use this book, you should be generally familiar with telephony and with the hardware that can be used to integrate Macintosh computers with telephone networks. This book explains some of the fundamental telephony concepts, but it is not intended to be either an introduction to or a technical reference for telephony in general. Rather, it explains how the Telephone Manager implements the standard telephony features such as placing outgoing telephone calls, answering incoming telephone calls, and so forth.

You should also be generally familiar with the Communications Toolbox, a part of the Macintosh system software that manages basic networking and communications services such as file transfer and terminal emulation. The Telephone Manager is part of the Communications Toolbox. If you have used the Communications Toolbox to develop other communications applications, you should find it especially easy to learn and use the Telephone Manager. See Inside the Macintosh Communications Toolbox for complete information about using the Communications Toolbox. Note, however, that this book is largely self-contained and does not assume that you have previously used the Communications Toolbox.

You should begin this book by reading the chapter "Introduction to Telephony on the Macintosh." That chapter provides an introduction to managing telephones on Macintosh computers. It's intended to help you quickly get started integrating telephony into your application. It also provides source code samples illustrating to use the most basic telephony capabilities of Macintosh computers. It also describes how to access the functions provided by the Telephone Manager and how to work with the telephone tools needed to manage the features of a given telephone terminal interface.

Once you are familiar with the basic uses of the Telephone Manager, you can read the remaining chapters in this book for more information on any particular topic. For example, for complete information on directory numbers, see the chapter "Directory Numbers."

Like all applications based on the Communications Toolbox, your telephony application should be largely driven by messages passed to it by the Telephone Manager. The chapter "Telephone Manager Messages" describes how to monitor and respond to telephony activities by receiving messages from the Telephone Manager. It describes the functions you use to determine which messages a telephone tool supports and to register and deactivate the message handlers that process the messages for your application. This chapter also describes all of the terminal, directory number, and call appearance messages that the Telephone Manager can send to your message handlers.

The chapter "Telephone Tools" describes telephone tools and provides detailed information about writing them. It first discusses the general concepts relevant to writing a tool and then describes the six resources that are an essential part of a telephone tool. These six resources are analogous to the six resources that must be in any communications tool used by the Communications Toolbox. You need to read this chapter only if you want to write a telephone tool.

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Preface Contents

Format of a Typical Chapter

Conventions Used in This Book

Special Fonts

Types of Notes

Development Environment

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