Gus What?!

The latest AIM 6.5 Beta is out. You can download it here. The release notes, as posted on AOL’s beta site, are as follows:

08/23/07 - Help us test drive our new AIM 6 beta software - version 6.5.3.12. We’ve heard your feedback on our earlier beta tests and have continued to make improvements to our new features. This version includes the following:

Status message in the Buddy List®: Broadcast a personal message to your friends, even when you’re available. Click Enter status message here… and type a message. It will appear under your screen name on their Buddy List and in your IM window. New! Thanks to beta feedback, we’ve updated this feature to only show a custom status message in your Buddy List view. Note: You’ll only see the set message of users who are on your buddy list and testing with the same version. We encourage you to create a new screen name and post it in the Message Boards created for this feature so others can add it to their Buddy List to see how this feature works.

State selector menu: Do you want to set yourself as Available, Away, Mobile or invisible? Choose from the handy state drop down button. Want to go away fast? Click the yellow sticky icon and we’ll set your away message. Click it again to come back from away.

Play games with your buddies: As part of the AIM install, you can choose to install additional software from QQ games. This plugin allows you to invite your AIM buddies to play games like Pool, Poker, Puzzles, Matching and more! Compete against buddies or other players in live games or relax in practice mode.

Modern design, plus more color: Check out the new sleek chrome. We’ve also added more color to the top of your Buddy List. Pick your favorite by clicking on the color wheel in the upper right corner.

Grouped IM tabs: Look for enhancements to your grouped IM window tabs. If your buddy goes away, you’ll see the away sticky to indicate this change. Look for visuals for mobile, idle, and offline too.

Get Buddy Info: We’ve removed the blue (i) from the Buddy List. It now only appears on your buddy’s details card when you hover over their screen name. You’ll still get the orange (i) in the Buddy List to indicate something new about your buddies.

Tips from AIM: Did you know you could do that on AIM? We’ve added more tips to the IM window since our last test.

Plus: Continue to test our new TXT Message mode feature from the IM window. Don’t waste your mobile phone text messages. Send them from AIM. Clicking the TXT Msg button on the IM form is just one new place you can access this mode. And, if you are having issues signing on AIM can help configure your firewall or proxy settings. Look for the Connection tab in your settings manager.

We hope you enjoy testing the latest version of the AIM 6 beta software.

As you can see there is a lot of stuff here. I hope you take some time to try this client out. If you do, i’d like to point out three things not mentioned:

First, I highly recommend that you uninstall the previous beta or AIM 6.1. You can do this from the add remove programs in Windows. Just, make sure you tell the uninstaller to keep your data when it asks. This should make your installation nice and clean.

Second, In case you are interested in Open AIM and plug-ins, this client is using an unreleased version of the AIM SDK, 1.4.0.

Third, The plug-ins page in the settings window and the rest of the client have been updated to support the new plug-in command flags. We support the AccCommandFlags as defined in the AIM SDK 1.3.0 and later. The biggest change, in the plugins tab, is that we only show commands that the plug-in actually registered to show there. Gone are the default settings commands for each plug-in. However, if you are running an old plug-in, you can still access the default settings command by double-clicking on the plugin’s name.

Please give this client a try. Feel free to leave a comment or question about this beta.

Thanks.

P.S. More to come.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 23rd, 2007 at 8:59 pm and is filed under AIM. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.