Telephone Messaging on XP
Telephone messaging seems to be the creature the world forgot - something that many of us need, but which isn't done very well. In fact, I'm still using Win98SE in deference to the crusty old Bitware 3.03 bundleware that seems the best of a bad lot.
Traditionally, this software has always been served up as bundled with the modem, so there's not a lot of incentive to create a killer phone app. I'd settle for being able to manage more than 100 messages without falling over, and the ability to seek, pause and play from arbitrary points in the message, much as one does with .WAV or .MP3 files; that doesn't seem too much to ask, given that some phone messaging apps already save the messages as .WAV files?
I believe this functionality should be built into the OS, as once a call is taken by the PC, it can't be handed off to another telephonic device. So fax software that can't handle voice calls can be next to useless for anyone who uses the same phone line for fax and voice.
(C) Chris Quirke, 29 March 2005, all rights reserved