Gus What?!

I have been updating this plug-in for almost two months now. I thought it would be a good time to write a few new rules to demonstrate some of its power.

The first step in creating a rule is to think about the effect you want to achieve. Basically, I believe that if you can compose it in the IM field, then you can also write a rule to do it. One thing I have seen many people do is to yell via IM. Basically they type in something like this:

This is time consuming. Nice and easy “yelling” is an example of something that is lacking in IM. The rule I wrote lets you type in any text and end it with two exclamation points. I used two exclamation points so I can still send un-altered messages with one.

So with this rule, you can type: “Shhhhhhhhhhh!!” and you will see:

Click here to import the ‘Yell’ rule into your RX-Plugin settings

The second rule came from some requests I saw people post online. They wanted to send a hidden message. The thought I had was to be able to type “/hide this is my hidden message.” and let the RX-Plugin send it in a hyper-link. The link would be useless, but if you hovered the mouse over it, the tooltip would show the hidden message. Here is a sample:

Click here to import the ‘Hidden Text’ rule into your RX-Plugin settings

So those are two rules you can add to your RX-Plugin settings by clicking the links above if you already have the plugin installed (version 0.7.1). You can also share your own rules on the Web and via IM by going to the Rules page of the RX-Plugin Settings window, selecting a rule, and clicking “Copy to Clipboard”. Then just paste it into your text editor, web page, or IM compose window.

Congratulations to the AIM Pro team for releasing their new IM client. I know, from personal experience, the amount of effort required to develop such and application. It is truly a nice product and the team deserves great kudos for this achievement.

AIM Pro has a number of cool advantages, it’s free, simple, small, fast, and installs fast too. You can run AIM Pro side by side with AIM Classic (5.x) and AIM Triton.

More important to the above is that AIM pro is using the same open AIM component used in AIM Triton, which means that AIM-Enabled plugins work with AIM Pro as well—with a caveat.

The bad news is that AIM Pro does not have the UI to support for plugins yet. So there is no “Plugins” page in their settings window and plugin menu items do not show up in the actions menu. The good news is that AIM Pro is still loading the plugin even though these UI entry-points don’t show up.

How does this affect my RX-Plugin? It just works if you can live with the missing UI. While you do, you can still access the RX-Plugin Settings window by going to your Windows Start button, select “Programs”, followed by “Gus Verdun”, and click on “RX-Plugin Settings”. The IMpulse feature in the RX-Plugin, which shakes your IM window, also works nicely in AIM Pro. The inline commands like “a//” (sets your away message from an IM compose window) and “s///” (lets you correct the previous IM) also work.

One flaw in AIM Pro is that it updates the history window with what you typed instead of what got sent after all the plugins did their transformations. In other words, if you type in something that gets converted by the RX-Plugin, you see what you typed and your buddy sees what was translated. This will get fixed when AIM Pro adds their plugin support.

In any case, this is a great start for this new business-oriented IM client. Download AIM Pro today and give it a try.

Just a quick post to let you know that version 0.7.1 of my RX-Plugin is now available for testing. You can read the release notes here. This build has some important fixes so I am including a direct link to download the plugin on that page. In the future you will be able to check for updates from within the RX-Plugin Settings window.

I will comment on some of the new features in a future post.

Today I am announcing the release of build 0.6.1.254 of Gus Verdun’s RX-Plugin (and covered on my blog under the RX-Plugin category.)

This build has a few bug fixes and a major new feature called IMpulse. Basically this feature will shake your IM window, or optionally any other window you happen to be in, when a buddy sends you a message containing one of the trigger words. An IMpulse is available in three different intensities, small, medium, and large. They are each triggered by unique trigger words that you can completely customize; just be sure to let your buddies know what they are.

Here is a demo hosted on AOL’s Uncut Video (Beta) service:

You can control who can IMpulse your IM windows: no one, anyone, people on your buddy list, people in your IMpulse group, or just the people in a group name you specify. Every time you get “IMpulsed” a log message appears so that you and your buddy will know that the IMpulse was successful.

Your window will get IMpulsed as well when you send one of the trigger words for an IMpulse and receive an auto-response that contains the word “impulse” in it.

For any IMpulse to occur, the receiving side must have the RX-Plugin installed and the feature enabled. You do not have to be running the plugin on your side to cause this to occur on your buddy’s side who is running the plugin. You just need to know the trigger words and be allowed to IMpulse your buddy’s IM window.

I encourage you to try it out today and welcome your feedback. If you want to send an IMpulse, just get your buddies to try out this plugin too.