Tag Archives: OpenAIM

New AIM MusicLink

Posted on by
47

UPDATE 6/9/08 11:00PM EST – The latest AIM MusicLink can be found at the home of AIM MusicLink. (http://www.gregsmind.com/musiclink)

I finished up a new version of AIM MusicLink version 2.0.0.4 last night based on feedback I was getting on the previous release. In version 2.0.0.4, I have added support for MediaMonkey, so AIM MusicLink now supports 7 different media players:

  • iTunes
  • WinAmp (version 5.5)
  • Windows MediaPlayer (version 10+)
  • Yahoo Jukebox
  • Real Player
  • Songbird (must manually install included extension)
  • MediaMonkey

I have also fixed a few bugs. First the situation of the first character being cut off. I had real trouble reproducing a case where I saw this, but I figured during streaming of music to WinAmp or Yahoo is where this would occur. In addition I fixed a problem where your status could be set to “[Buffering…” if you were listening to AIM Tunes songs in WinAmp. I also added an “About” screen via the new IAccCommand flag AccCommandFlag_AboutUi.

Here is the new about screen:

To access the preferences click the actions menu as shown and choose “AIM MusicLink Preferences”

Once you set the preferences you will start seeing your status and profile updated like this:

You can download the plugin here and as always I appreciate any feedback you guys have.

Open AIM 1.5

Posted on by
Reply

We posted Open AIM 1.5 today on developer.aim.com. This new update represents the same Open AIM engine that AIM 6.5 launched with earlier this month. Here are some of the changes we have made from Open AIM 1.3, the full release notes can be found here:

  • In the Java Wrapper we updated to current AIMCC APIs.
  • Support for sub menu plugin commands, so now you can have a plugin command menu item that is a fly out. (Note that the AIM 6.5 client will be adding this support in the next release, so you will not see sub menus until that release.)
  • Added a new property for user and session called AvTrack. This property is used for extended info for the current video or audio track that is playing in your media player.
  • In addition to the property we added for AvTrack, we added an interface for the AvTrack so you can pass up the data easily to the host.

As always the SDK contains plenty of samples and our documentation is live on the web here. If you have questions or feedback you can leave them on our message boards.

Are We Still Doing AIM Betas?

Posted on by
Reply

The most popular question I have been getting lately has been regarding AIM Betas and whether we will be releasing betas in the future. I guess it has been made known that some members of our beta team were impacted by last month’s changes. In my 8+ years working on AIM we always have done betas and I can assure you this will continue. We will still be getting your feedback via the usual channels, beta.aol.com, my blog, forums, and Report-A-Bug. In fact we are working on a release right now, and it will makes it way out the door very soon. I encourage everyone if they have questions to leave comments below or send me an IM using AIM Wimzi on the right side of the screen. Next week we will have some Open AIM news. Have a great weekend, and enjoy Super Bowl 41.5 tomorrow.

Happy Halloween

Posted on by
Reply

For a while people have been asking me for access to the presentations I have done over the years. Well, they were posted internally at AOL for the past few months, but now that I have the new blog, I am posting them publicly. You will find all the talks I have given here in 2007. You will notice that I will also be taking all the code samples that I posted on the old blog here and the plugins link will point to the AIM Gallery. To find this page later, there is a link in my blog roll section.

One thing that I have not blogged about but definitely deserves some attention is AIM Tunes. We included a plugin in the AIM 6.5 release we did at the beginning of the month that allows you to you to listen to music from your buddies. It’s as simple as that. Check out http://x.aim.com/music for more information! We put together a little tutorial to show you how easy it is to use. From a technical perspective, the plugin takes advantage of AIM’s Open API using IAccCustomSession interface. As always we love to get the feedback from you guys on how we are doing.

AIM Gallery and Profile Questions

Posted on by
3

A few weeks ago we launched AIM Gallery. This site is the repository where you can find all the OpenAIM plugins, clients, bot, mashups that 3rd party developers are building. Instead of hosting my stuff on my blog, I can now push it to the Gallery. Of course we built a feedback mechanism into the Gallery so you can rank and comment.

I have been reading the feedback on the profile problems that have been reported. I need a little bit more follow up to understand what is happening. For the person who signs on at work and loses the profile from home, are both clients AIM 6.5? We made a change to the way profiles are handled by the client and how they interact with the AIM Cloud. Profiles now are stored on the host so when you sign offline the profile is still accessible via your AIM Page, etc. In old AIM clients, this was not the case. I am getting our QA to just sanity check a few things, during development there was a bug similar to what you guys are describing. We have discovered one issue, where if you sign on with AIM 6.5 and set a profile, sign off and then sign on, say at work with AIM 5.9, sign off, then sign on with AIM 6.5 back at home, if you view your profile it will still be there, but if you edit your profile it may be blank. As we get more details I will let you know. 🙂

Tomorrow I am off across the Atlantic to see ICQ in Tel Aviv. I will post a few pictures on the blog. Until then, have a good start to the weekend.

AIM 6.5

Posted on by
2

AIM 6.5 BLThe past few weeks have been a barn burner. We released so many different things it makes me wonder what are we not doing. In this blog post I am going to focus solely on the AIM 6.5 release. Those who have found it at aim.com (and there are many people who already have) can attest this release continues to positive trend of improvements to the client and the Open AIM platform.

The difference between AIM 6.1 and AIM 6.5 is quite significant. We have tried to bubble up some existing technology to give it more prominence in the client. For example, the ability to send SMS text from AIM to your buddy’s cell phone is much easier, and is of course free in the US. We also now support status messages in the buddy list. Status has been part of the platform for a few years, if you have ever used iChat on a Mac you would have seen their implementation of it. I used the status API in the AIM MusicLink plugin I wrote as well as TwitterMan where you can set your status in AIM and Twitter at the same time. Status is a great way to share with your buddies what you are up too.

In AIM 6.5 we of course have full support for expressions and we made a bunch of good improvements to audio and video.

There are a few other features in this release, but I am saving those for their own blog posts.

IM Window

What’s Old is New

Posted on by
3

AIM is still here, as am I. I have been wanting to relaunch my blog for about 6 months, that is why I have been having trouble blogging for the past few months. So this is the relaunch, I am calling it Greg’s Mind, because, the blog will share what I am minding. If you want to go back and look at the old blog, it can be found here.

Of course we will cover all things AIM and Open AIM related, but also some great stuff happening out in the social media and networking world. I may even have a pop culture reference or two, to share.

We have obviously been doing a lot of stuff over the past few weeks, since I last blogged and I will be catching up on those as well as sharing with you some of the things we are working on. So stay tuned, and welcome to the new blog.