RS Phonebook

This project was developed in 2006, when I was 13 years old, in order to delve into screen scraping and databases. It is now deprecated, as the online web services it interacts with have greatly changed since, and the features relying on them do not work anymore. This page only exists for archival purposes.

Project summary

This was my first application which was finished up to a point where it works, released to the public, then updated to v1.0.1.

The software was a relatively simple phonebook tailored to romanian users, as it featured grabbers to the only two phone companies at the time. The user interface was translated to three languages: English, Hungarian and Romanian.

The first version called the grabber functions in a loop to get the results. This was relatively slow as it couldn't give instant results when the user clicked the Search button. After several user feedbacks about this, I researched multithreading and reimplemented the search to be parallel on all the providers.

Supported sites

Short-lived life

Shortly after the software got featured on Softpedia, RDS started serving the results as images. Although I wanted to continue the development of the software, I couldn't crack the cipher text which was passed to the image generator and I also couldn't write a working OCR at that time, I chose to discontinue the development of the software.

Screenshot

I was able to dig up this animated GIF of the software from my archive. I couldn't take new screenshots as the grabbers aren't working anymore because it's been way too many years since they were implemented.

animated screenshot from 2006, yay!