Open FaceTime Call from Command Line

By  on  

Communication tools are always associated with UIs, and for good reason -- if you want communication to be easy and intuitive, you need easy and intuitive interfaces. We need communication tools to provide the lowest barrier of entry, since not all users will be tech savvy.

For tech experts like us, however, we love command line tools to automate just about everything. This led me to thinking: is it possible to initiate a FaceTIme call from command line?

# Call Jenny
open facetime://5558675309

Using the FaceTime protocol, you can start a FaceTime call from command line with the recipient's phone number.

My children better hope that I don't get remote access to their computers when they move away -- they'll suddenly be calling their mother every day!

Recent Features

  • By
    I’m an Impostor

    This is the hardest thing I've ever had to write, much less admit to myself.  I've written resignation letters from jobs I've loved, I've ended relationships, I've failed at a host of tasks, and let myself down in my life.  All of those feelings were very...

  • By
    CSS @supports

    Feature detection via JavaScript is a client side best practice and for all the right reasons, but unfortunately that same functionality hasn't been available within CSS.  What we end up doing is repeating the same properties multiple times with each browser prefix.  Yuck.  Another thing we...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Retrieve Your Gmail Emails Using PHP and IMAP

    Grabbing emails from your Gmail account using PHP is probably easier than you think. Armed with PHP and its IMAP extension, you can retrieve emails from your Gmail account in no time! Just for fun, I'll be using the MooTools Fx.Accordion plugin...

  • By
    Introducing MooTools ElementSpy

    One part of MooTools I love is the ease of implementing events within classes. Just add Events to your Implements array and you can fire events anywhere you want -- these events are extremely helpful. ScrollSpy and many other popular MooTools plugins would...

Discussion

    Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!