Gus What?!

I think I left a few things vague about my plug-in proposal. I’ll take this opportunity to clear things up and give you an update.

In case there was any confusion this will not be an open-source plug-in. If you want to contribute with your ideas, please do so with the understanding that you are giving them away for free. Also note that I may have already thought of some of the ideas I receive. All ideas submitted will be treated as public domain, everyone can use it as they see fit. I will have a credits list at the end of this project.

That being said, I will talk openly and freely about the open AIM API and about some of the technology I will use to implement this plug-in.

In my last post, I estimated that this project would take about sixty days to complete. Its been almost 14 days. I have not actually started to code this. I am still in the planning stages and so the sixty days won’t start just yet. So bear with me a bit.

In my next post I will cover some of the technology I will use to develop this plug-in and why I think it’s possible to add this kind of functionality to any Open AIM client.

Today I am going to start by inviting all of you to join me in designing a plug-in. The deal is this: I am your developer. You tell me the features you want, and if I think I can do it, I will estimate the effort, design it, and make it happen. The end result, is a plug-in that we can all use and share. I hope that the effort can be concluded within 60 days. (Remember, I can only work on this in my spare time.)

The plug-in I propose to make is based on an idea that has been around for a while. I want to add the ability in AIM to let you paint on an image that you and your buddy can see in real-time.

Does this sound like a good idea? Remember this plug-in is for you. What would you do with such a plug-in? Draw lines? stamp icons? Write secret messages? What shall we name it?

Please leave your thoughts and ideas as comments. Maybe we can form a chat room and talk about this. Lets see how it goes. The floor is now open to you.

Thanks.

I just released a new version of this plug-in. You can read the complete release notes here. The Idle Lock feature is now vastly improved. You should now be able to activate Idle Lock without any of the previously known problems. Idle Lock also now works when you have multiple AIM clients running with this plug-in loaded. I have also made numerous improvements to the inline commands (corrections and away messages) and IMpulse.

Please give it a try today and let me know what you think.