Dropbox chat

Lyrical introduction

As is usually the case on Sunday morning, and even more so when the weather is not good anymore, you begin to look for an interesting activity. And somehow it struck me that Dropbox synchronizes some files again, and very quickly. So fast that you can do nothing but ... chat!
A rather strange idea, but if you wanted to, you need to do it.

What came of it

So, as I write for the web, PHP DevelStudio was chosen as the IDE, which makes the hack a bit more strange, but I didn’t have another way to write everything in an hour, and for a longer time all the instant enthusiasm would evaporate.

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

When you first start asking for a login, and the path to the file in which the chat will be conducted:
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Then, after entering the data, an ascetic chat window appears:



There are notifications about logging in and out of the chat, as well as, actually, messages. As you can see from the screenshot, the delay is a few seconds, but this is not ICQ, the main result here, and it was reached.

In principle, the application can be used by simply 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 your favorite Dropbox, and 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 for you!