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
    Create a CSS Flipping Animation

    CSS animations are a lot of fun; the beauty of them is that through many simple properties, you can create anything from an elegant fade in to a WTF-Pixar-would-be-proud effect. One CSS effect somewhere in between is the CSS flip effect, whereby there's...

  • By
    Chris Coyier’s Favorite CodePen Demos

    David asked me if I'd be up for a guest post picking out some of my favorite Pens from CodePen. A daunting task! There are so many! I managed to pick a few though that have blown me away over the past few months. If you...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    CSS Custom Cursors

    Remember the Web 1.0 days where you had to customize your site in every way possible?  You abused the scrollbars in Internet Explorer, of course, but the most popular external service I can remember was CometCursor.  CometCursor let you create and use loads of custom cursors for...

  • By
    Drag & Drop Elements to the Trash with MooTools 1.2

    Everyone loves dragging garbage files from their desktop into their trash can. There's a certain amount of irony in doing something on your computer that you also do in real life. It's also a quick way to get rid of things. That's...

Discussion

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