Silica

Lightweight Caller ID for Mac OS X

New Version

About Silica

I just wanted to know who was calling. Nothing fancy, but it'd be really nice to be able to see who is on the phone without actually having to look up from what I'm concentrating on right now. That was the desire that drove the creation of Silica and I figured other people might like it, too. It consumes very little in the way of system resources, and provides a heads-up display - like the OS X volume and brightness adjustment feedback - showing you the number and, if available, name on the incoming call. Silica tries to look up the phone number in the OS X address book, and will display that name and the caller's picture if present.

Sample Display

Using Silica

The first time you run Silica, you'll probably want to configure it to your tastes. Silica offers a fair amount of customization of the on-screen notification of an incoming call. The Opacity slider lets you decide how "solid" the notification window is when it is initially displayed. The default of 0.5 is roughly comparable to the brightness and volume feedback from the OS. The window will be displayed for as many seconds as you like at its full intensity and then fade off over another configurable time span.

Configuration

Silica also keeps a log of call activity. You can always delete calls manually, but you can also configure Silica to age off old entries if you really don't care about anything that came in, for example, a month ago.

Call Log

The configuration panel also includes a button to start or stop the background process and a checkbox that will set the notifications to be active any time you're logged in.

System Requirements

Silica requires Mac OS X 10.3 or higher and a Caller-ID capable modem. That should be it. Please be aware, though, that there are multiple Caller ID protocols and not all modems support all of them. If you've got one that doesn't work, I can work with you to try to get it going.

License

Silica is freeware; no payment is required although I'm not too proud to accept it if you really need to. If you use Silica please consider making a charitable donation to Fidelco.

Someone who feels compelled to give me money might want to check out my trash automation utility, Compost.