Gus What?!

It was a year ago today that AIM Triton had its first public beta release. Back then, this event generated a lot of buzz since it had been a long time since AOL released an IM client, in any form, let-alone a complete re-write.

This beta was a major milestone in our journey that to took us well over six months to get to. Many of the components like Boxely, EE, and AIMCC had started their journey even before we did. Combined, these efforts saw their first day of light outside of AOL in this “Beta-One”.

I recall seeing members of my team on that day, myself included, constantly hitting those IM related websites like bigblueball.com, neowin.net, and slashdot.org. “Will this be AIM 6?” was one of the often asked questions. I have to say, I purposely named our executable aim6.exe but I could not bring myself to put that in the about box.

It is on this anniversary that I want to take a brief moment to thank those that helped us get there, both those who are still with us and those who have since moved on. I thank you all.

Last year, the AIM Triton development team decided to play a little (silly) April Fools joke on QA. We were getting ready for our first public beta of AIM Triton and have been developing the UI in Boxely.

The team decided to throw in some code to make it impossible to activate the signon button. You couldn’t set focus to the button and every time you tried to move the mouse over it, the button would jump out of the way. It did it for about 20 jumps and then popped up a dialog saying something to the effect: “haha April Fools”. US QA got a kick out of it. No one, that I recall, wrote a bug on it.

The funniest part was having to explain what “April Fools” was to our international QA team.

This year we are not doing any pranks (or are we?). Happy April Fools.