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
    Responsive and Infinitely Scalable JS Animations

    Back in late 2012 it was not easy to find open source projects using requestAnimationFrame() - this is the hook that allows Javascript code to synchronize with a web browser's native paint loop. Animations using this method can run at 60 fps and deliver fantastic...

  • By
    Regular Expressions for the Rest of Us

    Sooner or later you'll run across a regular expression. With their cryptic syntax, confusing documentation and massive learning curve, most developers settle for copying and pasting them from StackOverflow and hoping they work. But what if you could decode regular expressions and harness their power? In...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Fx.Rotate:  Animated Element Rotation with MooTools

    I was recently perusing the MooTools Forge and I saw a neat little plugin that allows for static element rotation: Fx.Rotate. Fx.Rotate is an extension of MooTools' native Fx class and rotates the element via CSS within each A-grade browser it...

  • By
    Camera and Video Control with HTML5

    Client-side APIs on mobile and desktop devices are quickly providing the same APIs.  Of course our mobile devices got access to some of these APIs first, but those APIs are slowly making their way to the desktop.  One of those APIs is the getUserMedia API...

Discussion

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