Introducing Private Maps

I’ve always been missing a maps app that is private, lightweight, easy on the battery, and in standard OpenStreetMap style. So, I created one! Meet Private Maps. It uses high-resolution tiles for best experience on retina screens. The tiles are raster, which means they are created on the server and not on your devices, resulting in longer battery life. Also, the map doesn’t suffer from the simplification on the lower zoom levels that can be seen in the apps using vector tiles....

November 1, 2023

What’s new in Telephone 1.6

Telephone 1.6 adds support for the modern macOS look and Apple Silicon.

June 16, 2022

What’s new in Telephone 1.5

Telephone 1.5 is there, and it supports encryption. UDP is probably the most widely used protocol for SIP. It is also used by default in Telephone. If you haven’t changed SIP transport in settings, UDP is used. Some public SIP providers or company servers may also work with TCP, but UDP still seems to be the default. Neither UDP nor TCP transport provides encryption. The communication between the phone and the SIP server happens in the clear....

August 28, 2020

What’s new in Telephone 1.4.2

Two versions of Telephone—1.4.1 and 1.4.2—have been released. Here’s what’s changed. The new Music app macOS Catalina introduced a new Music app. It replaced iTunes, which had been with us for quite some time. Internally, Music is not a renamed iTunes, but a completely different app, with own identifier. That’s why Telephone in Catalina stopped pausing music. Telephone update fixes this. VPNs More and more often people connect to their telephony server remotely....

April 8, 2020

What is VoIP

Voice over IP is a way of having phone calls via the Internet or local computer network. Calls on Face Time, Skype, WhatsApp, Messenger, or Telegram are VoIP calls. But these services are locked to itself. You can’t call somebody on WhatsApp from Skype. Luckily, VoIP is not limited to locked services. The technology is open and widely used in combination with traditional phone services. If you want to call somebody on a regular phone number, you can make it using VoIP....

March 3, 2020

Ten years of Telephone

Earlier this week, Telephone turned 10. On December 17, 2008, I released the first version 0.8 to the public. It was on Google Code—a go-to place for hosting and publishing opensource projects. Since then, it’s come a long way. The source code repository has been migrated two times: from SVN to Mercurial to git. The project hosting has moved from Google Code to GitHub. The distribution—from Google Code to the Mac App Store....

December 21, 2018

What’s new in Telephone 1.4

It’s been quite some time since the last release and I’m glad to present Telephone 1.4 to you. Dark Mode Dark Mode is a feature of macOS Mojave and Telephone now fully supports it. Same as system Historically, Telephone has been using built-in devices for playing and capturing audio unless a specific device is selected in preferences. This had been the expected behavior of Mac apps in the past and it changed over time....

November 22, 2018

What’s new in Telephone 1.3

Telephone 1.3 has been released and I’m thrilled to tell you about this update. Call history The long-awaited call history is finally here! It conveniently looks up names in your macOS Contacts, just as one of the app’s favorite features—contacts autocompletion—already does. Press Tab to switch the keyboard focus between the text field and the history. Press Return to make a call. Press Delete to remove the call from the history....

January 15, 2018