When I learned about Network Caller ID (NCID), I knew it was exactly what I wanted. I’ve got an old, but caller-ID capable, modem in an old OpenBSD box and it grabs all the caller ID data and serves it up. The only thing left is to get that data to each machine.

I was very disappointed in the choices in NCID clients for OS X. I settled on using David LaPorte’s shell scripts that hook into the command-line tool for Growl notification. This worked pretty well. Annoyingly for me, I get calls about every half-hour during the day, six days a week, mostly from “Toll-Free” or “Out-of-Area” and my annoyance with not knowing who’s calling had led me to whocalled.us. I was able to use Maxim Samo’s junk_lookup.agi script to help me modify David LaPorte’s scripts so that now all my incoming calls were looked up on whocalled.us. This worked reasonably well.

I now had an AppleScript app on my desktop that ran the shellscript that started the command-line NCID client that triggered a shell script that used curl and some other voodoo to query whocalled.us and reprocess all that info into a log and into the command-line interface for Growl. If I were busy all the time, I wouldn’t have given this a second thought, since it worked. But what I really wanted was a single program with a nice little menu thing up by the clock that controlled it. So I learned some Objective-C and some Cocoa and here’s the result.