Dropbox chat

Lyrical introduction

As it usually happens on Sunday morning, and even more so when the weather is bad again on the street, you start looking for yourself an interesting lesson. And somehow it struck me that Dropbox was syncing some files again, and very quickly. So fast that you can do nothing more than ... chat!
Quite a strange idea, but just wanted to - do it.

What came of it

So, as I write on the web, PHP DevelStudio was chosen as the IDE, which makes the work a little weirder, but I had no other way to write everything in an hour, and in a longer time all the instant enthusiasm would have evaporated.

And so, for simplicity, it was decided to store messages in a simple text file. At first there was an idea of ​​some kind of structure, but in the name of simplicity of reading a file without an application, I refused it, and all messages are stored in a heap in chronological order.

At the first start, the login is asked, and the path to the file in which the chat will be conducted:



Then, after entering the data, the ascetic chat window appears:



There are notifications about the entrance and exit from the chat, as well as the message itself. As you can see from the screenshot, the delay is a few seconds, but this is not ICQ, the main result is here, and it was achieved.

In principle, you can use the application simply by opening the file from the general location of the local network.

The application was tested on Windows XP, 7 and Ubuntu 11.10 under Wine.

Summary

Now you can safely add one more function to the functionality of many Dropbox beloved, and the starting 2 GB of space is enough for many years of correspondence.

Link to the application
And the project for DevelStudio

Thank you for your attention, interesting ideas!