I am using Skype for most of my online communication, mostly because other people are using it and there are strange firewalls at work preventing most other protocols. Alas there’s no support for Skype out of the box and the skype linux crew is kinda slow (Skype 2.1, anyone?). Enters me who needed some diversion from master thesis writing..

indicator-applet with skype

May I introduce indicator-skype-client.py: it’s a small script, written in two or three hours (most of the time spent upon finding strange bugs in python-indicate). It currently provides a list of unread messages. When a username is clicked the corresponding skype window is opened or created. By clicking on the Skype label its main window is displayed. So far it works.. various updates will follow.

How to install?
Just start the python script while skype is already running. Skype will ask if you want to allow the script to access its data, just answer yes. The script will do the rest. It does not install itself into the user session, so you’ll have to start it if you want skype notifications.

TODOs

• There are various workarounds in the code (for example I needed an empty callback to get things displayed), work out those bugs
• currently there’s a hard refresh every 5 seconds (in addition to incoming message detection). This will have to go and be replaced with a more dynamic scheme.
• detect if an unread conversation was openend within Skype and do not display this conversation
• somehow automatically start the script when Skype or the indication-applet starts

So some things are missing, but the script is already workable. Have fun (and please provide patches if you fix problems (: ).