Last week we launched a new home page for the AOL Developer Network. The page has been cleaned up and navigation is much easier. One thing we cleared up was the network that the developer network supports including OpenAIM, ICQ, Truveo, etc. Some of you may notice a different OpenAIM logo.
Some of the improvements you see on the developer network home page will make their way into the Open AIM developer network pages too.
A few people have been asking me about AIM Lite as it has been over a year since we last did a release. I wanted to take this opportunity to clear up some stuff with AIM Lite. The idea of a light-weight AIM client pre-dates my 9+ years at AOL, by a few months, but it really came to surface in the winter of 2006 during the AIM Triton project.
When we created AIM Lite it was done as an exercise to improve the architecture that was used to connect Open AIM to the user interface elements. Things like displaying IMs, rendering 1000 buddies in a Buddy List, and composing IMs were improved in AIM Lite. Now much of that knowledge resides in the AIM client, and has been available to everyone since last year’s AIM 6.5 release.
AIM Lite also gave birth to a feature everyone benefited from in June of 2008. AIM Lite featured a type of AIM Plugin called AIM Widgets (AWI). These AIM Widgets led us to developing AIM Modules, which are a super set of AWIs in functionality and features.
I can’t say we will never touch the AIM Lite code base again, and for those who still use AIM Lite, we have no plans to decommission it either. Hopefully this clears up any misconceptions behind AIM Lite, and if you are looking for a simple AIM experience, check out the AIM Express client. The best part is that there is no download for the client, as long as Flash 9 is installed.
A lot of users have been asking me about the AIM Buddy Feed that appears in the Buddy Info window. Some people are wondering how to turn off their buddy feed, while others are wondering if they can do more with it. First, lets look at where the Buddy Feed appears in the AIM client.
When your buddy has a new feed item an orange icon will appear next to their name:
If you click that icon, it will open up the buddy info window for that user. You will see something like this:
The area circled in red is the AIM Buddy Feed. In this area your friends can see what plugins you have installed or if you have updated your AIM Profile.
For those that want to turn off AIM Buddy Feeds, skip the next two paragraphs.
If you are reading this you want to know more of what you can do with your AIM Buddy Feeds. Our buddy feeds allow you to share with your buddies stuff you are doing outside of AIM and AOL. If you are on Twitter, Flickr or MySpace you can add those accounts into your AIM Buddy Feed. The way to modify or manage your feed is to use our Manage Feeds page.
If you are a developer, and are wondering if there is a way to get your content into AIM Buddy Feeds, the answer is “of course!” In the latest Open AIM SDK available on the Open AIM website, you can access the IAccBuddyFeedManager and create a new IAccBuddyFeed item. Then using the BuddyFeedManager, you can Push that new item.
If you want to manage the privacy for your own AIM Buddy Feed, you can do this in the AIM client by opening your Preferences and choosing the Privacy tab. There are checkboxes at the bottom of that dialog for you to check or uncheck.
Sometimes I just like to view all of my friend’s feeds at one time on one page, and we have that too. We also have a page that consolidates all of your feeds so you can what you are doing .
I have patched AIM MusicLink to work with Songbird 1.0. Unfortunately it requires a full download and not just the Songbird Extension. I have updated the full download on the AIM MusicLink homepage.
I have posted the latest version of AIM MusicLink, version 4.1.0.0. If you are an existing AIM MusicLink user, you will get prompted for auto upgrade. You can ignore the upgrade, or get it later. You can get an upgrade via the Check For Upgrade button via the AIM MusicLink Preference window. You will only be prompted once. There are some real key feature and bug fixes in this release.
Here is a screen shot of the new preference panel showing how to change the status format.
AIM MusicLink Preferences 4.1.0.0
You can download the latest AIM MusicLink here.
To read all about AIM MusicLink or to get questions answered make sure to visit the AIM MusicLink homepage.
Happy holidays everyone. I realize it has been a while since I have posted on what’s going on with AIM, ICQ, OpenAIM and the general state of messaging. I have about 5 posts queued up, and you will start seeing these being published over the next two weeks.
One interesting note this morning we had a major water main break not far from my house in Maryland. I happened to mention it in my twitter feed, and about 5 minutes later The Washington Post picked up on my feed and others.
Glad that no one was seriously injured or killed. Stay tuned for the latest news.
On Tuesday we posted the latest AIM for Mac client, Beta3, on our beta website. AIM for Mac was first released a month ago, and in that time we have made a bunch of changes. The application is built on top of the Open AIM Cocoa framework that is available as part of the Open AIM Mac SDK. Here are some highlighted changes in Beta 3:
You can download AIM for Mac Beta 3 here.
As always we appreciate feedback on how this client is coming along.
** – I find it interesting that Google Talk launched IM to SMS as a very very burried feature in GTalk today. It will be 5 years on December 17th this year that we released IM to SMS for AIM. I along with our mobile team in Seattle and our AIM Host team in Dulles brought this great feature to the client oh so many years ago.
This morning we published AIM Vote ’08 to the gallery, so get out there and make it known who you are voting for. The vote total dynamically updates, so you can see in real time the results.
And next week go from the virtual AIM voting booth to the real voting booth, make your voice count.
Last week we launched the latest AIM 6.9 beta, so I am a week late posting on this, as I was away last week. We have changed the UI to be more graphical in nature and given users back some space on their buddy list.
But in the better late than never category, here is the change log:
You can download AIM 6.9 Beta 2 here.
As always feedback is appreciated.
We have refreshed the Open AIM SDK, now the latest version is 1.68. The SDK allows developers on Windows, Mac, Linux, and Win Mobile to build your own AIM client, AIM plugins as well as AIM Bots. The SDK supports C++, C-Sharp, VB, and Java. We have the full change log on the Open AIM developer website, but I want to highlight a few additions here:
In addition to these and many more features and bug fixes we added a full sample C-Sharp GUI based client called awshbuddy. This reference application hopefully makes life easier for developers looking to do more with both C-Sharp as well as Visual Basic.
As with any SDK refresh we have updated all our samples and documentation on the developer website.