Gus What?!

Today I am announcing the availability of anonymous beta registrations. You don’t have to give me your e-mail address if you prefer not to. Privacy, security, and safety are important to me and I understand and respect everyone’s needs. Note that you will need to keep a copy of your activation key since I will not be able to e-mail it to you again. I can still provide support for those who registered anonymously. My contact information is available in the RX-Plugin page.

Beta testing registrations are starting to trickle in every couple of days. Please tell your friends and keep the comments coming. I appreciate your interest and thank you for test-driving this new plug-in.

In this post I will cover the second of the two “Enable Inline Commands” option feature.

You just sent an IM to a buddy saying you will be right there. What’s the next thing you need to do? Set your away message, right? The RX-Plugin lets you do it from your IM compose window. No need to grab your mouse and find that “away” message button. Just type “a/Your away message/” (letters in bold are literal characters) and press enter. Your buddy might see you typing so, when you press enter, it will send “away message set…” to your buddy and set the message you typed in as your away message. When you come back, simply enter “a//” in any IM compose field and it will clear your away message. No message will be sent to your buddy when you clear your away message.

I encourage you to try it out today and welcome your feedback.

In this post I will cover one of the features in “Enable Inline Commands” that was referenced in a previous post.

Let’s say you typed a message and sent it to your buddy. Then you saw your typo. What can you do? Copy, paste, correct and send? Here is another way: The RX-Plugin remembers the last message you sent to anyone and lets you type in a simplified regular expression in the IM compose window to fix your mistake. You don’t have to re-write the entire message–just the part that is wrong.

The command is invoked by entering the following in the IM compose window: “s/wrong/right/” (letters in bold are literal characters) where “wrong” is the word to be replaced and “right” is the word to replace it with. You can also append an ‘i‘ and/or ‘g‘ to the expression to make it ignore case and apply the correction to all occurrences, respectively.

You can also extend the previous message you just sent by entering “s// the part you want to add to the end of your previous message./“.

Whenever you correct a previous message the RX-Plugin will add “CORRECTION:” at the front of the message. The previous message will be inserted at the front when you are extending a message.

There are a few limitations on this feature. For now, only one correction can be entered at a time. You also can’t do any font changes or apply any real regular expressions in your corrections. The ignore case does not allow you to preserve case, for now, it simply replaces all occurrences of ‘wrong’, in any case, with ‘right’. NOTE: This literally works on the last message you sent to anyone. So, if you send an IM to buddy A and then send an IM to buddy B, you can’t go back to buddy A and correct the IM you sent to buddy A since the plugin only remembered what you just sent to buddy B and would apply your correction to the message sent to buddy B.

I encourage you to try it out today and welcome your feedback.

Here is a sample of what the RX-Plugin can do. The top line is what you and your buddy see as the result of the various regular expressions. The bottom line is what I typed and pasted back in to the compose window for demo purposes.

As posted in Plugin the Power of Regular Expressions

These rules will send, respectively, an IM with a link to this plugin’s home-page, a red “Are you there?”, a link to make it easy for your buddy to add your name to his/hers user list, a blue “yes”, a red “no”, a green “go”, and a link that your buddy can use to start an IM with the specified buddy in parenthesis. There are a few more rules which I will cover in a future post.

See RX-Plugin Settings… for more information on some of the features of this plugin.

Looks like we’re going to need more yarn!

In this post I will cover the RX-Plugin Settings Window. You use this window to edit your regular expression rules, enable or disable some features, and specify other options.

The RX-Plugin Settings window can be accessed via a number of methods. First, you can invoke it via the Actions menu in the AIM® Triton Buddy List® as shown here:

The second way to invoke this window is from the “Plugins” tab in AIM® Triton’s own Settings window. It is from here where you can enable and disable the plugin (that is tell AIMcc if it should load or unload it) as well as open the settings window for any plugin. Here is a portion of that window:

The final way to open the settings window is to click the shortcut to it in the Windows Start–>Programs–>Gus Verdun–>RX-Settings. Your IM client does not need to be running for the settings window to be opened. The options you save will be reflected immediately in the IM client or the next time it loads.

There are two tabs in the RX-Plugin Settings window. I will start with the Rules tab.

Rules Tab

This tab is where you specify all of your message translations rules. Starting from the left, you will see the “Rules” list-box. This is the list of rules that are defined. Each rule has a unique name that you can edit at any time. The order of rules matters since they will be executed in that order. This lets you cascade one rule into another in a predictable way. The checkbox to the left of the rule’s name is used to enable the rule. You disable a rule by un-checking the box.

The , , , buttons are used to move the selected rule up, down, add a new rule, and delete the selected rule, respectively.

The Rule Name edit box is where you assign your rule some descriptive name. It can be anything you want as long as it’s unique with respect to the other names.

The Match edit box is where you specify the regular expression that is used to find the text you want to translate.

The Scope option lets you specify what part of the message should the match be applied to: Just the text part or all markup? Be careful with the all markup option in that you could replace important parts of the markup and destroy the validity of your message—which means that it won’t send the message.

The Apply to option lets you choose if this rule should apply to outgoing or incoming messages. You can also make it apply to both types.

You can also select a few options like making the rule match only on word boundaries, ignore case, apply the rule to all occurrences in the message (Global), and skip the rule if it’s inside of an anchor tag. The last option is useful if your replacement text is trying to insert a link in the message. Clearly, you can’t insert a link in a link.

The Replace edit box is where you specify the text that is to be inserted in place of the matched text. There are special character sequences that let you insert parts of the matched text in various encodings. A backreference is specified in the regular expression using ()’s. They are numbered 0-9 where 0 is the entire matched text. To insert a backreference, you enter one of the following start characters, followed by the backreference number.

Here is a list of the various encodings you can insert a backreference in:

• \ - Inserts a the backreference as found. (Use \\ to insert a single \)
• % - Inserts a URL-encoded version of the backreference. (Use %% to insert a single %)
• & - Inserts an entity-escaped version of the backreference. (Use && to insert a single &)

You can also choose to force the backreference to be inserted in upper case or lower case (still using the encoding specified above) by referencing the backreference number as a letter [a-j] for lower case, and [A-J] for upper case. Use z and Z, respectively, for the 0 (full match) backreference.

There are two extra special macros here: %u will insert your ScreenName and %n will insert your buddy’s ScreenName.

Finally, the Test edit box is where you can test your rule by typing a message and seeing it get converted on the fly in the space below.

That completes the Rules Tab, I will cover the Options tab next.

Options Tab

This tab has some of the most basic settings. You can disable all rule translations by un-checking the “Enable Rules” option. Same for the “Enable inline commands”– I will cover this on another post.

And, finally, you can also save your rules to another file—be sure to click apply before you change this if you wanted to save the rules first. (The load and import rules option is in the works.)

This completes the RX-Plugin Settings window. Since this is still in beta, let me know if there are any features you would like to see. I welcome your feedback and comments. I also encourage you sign up for the beta and try it out.

Someone was asked what their favorite feature in Triton was. Is it the Buddy List®? Tabbed IM’s? SuperBuddies®? file-transfer? talk? instant-images? chatrooms? voice-chats? the vast array of expressions you can choose? Is it the fact that your friends are all there?

That was an interesting question to me. Being an architect, I’m crushed that I can’t say my favorite feature is its performance and rock-solid-implementation. I know we have a lot of work to do in these aspects. Given sufficient time, and with the right focus, I am confident we will achieve amazing results soon.

The question, though, still left me wanting my own answer. I did not think of this at the time, but, there is one feature I am most passionate about, but it’s not actually a feature of Triton, it’s of Open-AIM, and that is plugins support. This feature offers endless possibilities to anyone with the means to write one. AOL does not have to think and do everything, it can delegate some of the value added to others (Proof of point: Gus Verdun’s RX-Plugin.) “How liberating?!” was what one said about this concept. So true. It’s also my favorite feature in Firefox.

In all, rather than working towards building a favorite feature, I look forward to the day when users don’t even think of the client. It does everything they need, without annoyances, elegantly, gracefully, and therefore simply fades into the background. That’s when we will know we have the perfect client–and my truly favorite feature.

I know, I know I just about dropped off the face of the blogosphere as far as content goes these days. So, I’m back and…I have been quite busy as you are about to read.

I am proud to announce the start of beta testing for “Gus Verdun’s RX-Plugin”. Anyone can participate in this test. The basic information, registration and download page can be found at Gus Verdun’s RX-Plugin (BETA). Yes, you have to agree to a EULA and this plugin only works with AIM® Triton or any other AIM® enabled IM client. You will find more details in the plugin’s home-page.

So, “What does this plugin do?”, you might ask. It basically adds the power of regular expressions to help you transform your incoming and outgoing instant messages. Checkout, regular-expressions.info, for an excellent reference on this topic.

After registering with this site, you should begin by downloading the installer. A link to this will be provided after you register. You will receive your beta activation key via e-mail. Once you have the key, you can install the plugin by running the installer and activate it when you first sign on to AIM®. You will not be able to use the plugin until it is successfully activated. Hopefully, this part of the beta test will go as smoothly as possible.

I will begin to describe some of the unique features of this plugin over the next few posts. For now, I will point you to the most basic thing you will want to do: Where to customize the regular expression rules. Click on the blue “Actions” button in the Buddy List® and select the “RX-Plugin Settings…” option. If you don’t see it, then either the plugin is not installed, it is disabled (see below for how to enable it), or there is some other problem–let me know.

The plugin comes with some pre-defined rules to get you started. Try “gusrx”, “yt?”, “addme”, “yes”, “no”, “go”, and “im(gusverdun)”. These rules will send, respectively, an IM with a link to this plugin’s home-page, a red “Are you there?”, a link to make it easy for your buddy to add your name to his/hers user list, a blue “yes”, a red “no”, a green “go”, and a link that your buddy can use to start an IM with the specified buddy in parenthesis. There are a few more rules which I will cover in a future post.

IMPORTANT: There are some rules in the plugin that will interfere with the EZFormat plugin in AIM® Gadgets (formerly known as JAMS). I recommend that you disable either those rules in the RX-Plugin (EZ Bold, EZ Italics, and EZ Underline) or, disable the EZFormat plugin. To disable the EZFormat Plugin you can go to the “Plugins” tab in your AIM Settings (Press F7 from any AIM window and click on the Plugins tab) and un-check the EZFormat Plugin. The RX-Plugin also lets you enable and disable individual rules via a checkbox next to the rule’s name.