“InterTalk” is a windows based “Chat” application developed in Microsoft Visual Basic/6, specially for the environment of NIC district centres. This software enables you to establish interactive connection with one of the remote stations connected to the ‘Net’ using SLIP or similar protocols, which use pre-assigned I.P.Addresses. NIC district centres accessing Internet by IPA / FTDMA are using similar protocols .
How is InterTalk different from others? An obvious question comes to mind that when many professionally designed Chat-applications like “Yahoo Messenger” are available free of cost then why should one bother to develop such an application. The main feature that distinguishes it in the crowd of others, is its ability to alert the recipient about an incoming call. People using other “Chat applications” can establish a connection with the desired person, only if, he is already logged on to the same domain . This considerably limits the chance of finding a desired person on the ‘net’ at your will and is the main hurdle in establishing an interactive communication . Thus, the only way left is to first set your timings with the counterpart through telephonic call/email . the other hand, eliminates this problem atleast within the NIC environment . You just select a remote site from the list, the memory resident ‘InterTalk’ running at other side in server mode will sense the call and alert the recipient about the incoming call by triggering an audio/visual alarm .Beside this, the ‘InterTalk’ is equipped with some other features and many future enhancements are also possible. This can be modified to simultaneously support multiple connections to provide a platform for conferencing . It is important to note that although the software has been developed specially for NIC, yet, one can install it on any node which is connected to the Internet with a preassigned I.P.address. Also, any computer on the net using conventional ‘dial-up’ connection can exploit its client feature, that is, they can initiate a connection request using ‘Intertalk’ , though, others can’t connect to them .
Main features
- Automatic incoming call detection with audio / video alarm . Even if at that time, the user is busy in some other
application on the same machine, he/she would get alerted to the incoming chat call .
- “Send File” option available during “Chat Mode” This enables you to send an ASCII file to remote user online using
TCP/IP, which ensures data integrity .
- “Save File” option available during chat mode, which enables you to save “Chat Session” in a file including any file
uploaded from remote .
- In case of user’s absence, this will act as an “Answering Machine”, and also it will save “Callers” message in a log
file which will enable the user to read message(s) received in his absence .
- Automatic signal, if any message(s) are received in your absence .
- Study is going on to convert it to support multi-connection simultaneously to provide a platform for conferencing .
Limitations Presently, the software does not have a provision for editing “Remote stations directory”. You have to do it manually, the data is stored in a table named “stations” in remotestations.mdb file . One just has to open the table in MS Access and fill remote station and its I.P.Address, the table has only two fields . The remotestations.mdb file is located in the folder where the software is installed, by default it is “c:\programfiles\InterTalk” . Another limitation is the possibility of facing windows run-time errors since the error detecting routines of the software are still under development . Hardware & Software Requirements Any Internet ready machine suitable for installation of Windows-95/98 with multimedia. The software files will take approximately 3 MB of Hard disk space The presence of Windows’95 / Windows’98/ Windows 2000 operating systems is a must.