In the beginning, Software is about as useful as a large indoor fireplace in the middle of a hot summer–cozy-looking, but impractical. So, here we are at the beginning of the IM Control Panel.
I am still amazed at the amount of work needed to get a simple application out the door. You need a configuration management system, a build system or scheme, an automated version number incrementing tool, an installer with an uninstaller, a license file, a webpage, a tool to upload these items, etc. just to build a distribution. You also need to write the application, collect nice artwork (I am definitely not an artist but I love hammers), test it, document it (still need to do this), generate ideas on what to do next (have tons), time, money, etc.
So, after 217 builds (one build is roughly one sub-feature or one bug fix/attempted fix), I finally have something I feel useful enough to distribute. You can read the release notes and download it here.
The basic idea I have for making the IM Control Panel is to provide AIM Triton users a tool to safely tweak and explore the AIM Triton installation.
I am starting with the runtime problems users could have. I believe that there are some cases in the field where the runtime becomes unstable. So, I am providing a feature that lets you terminate all the OCP processes to let you start things over without a reboot. I do not want this to be the normal way of terminating the application, however, I feel this is necessary, at the moment, for some AIM Triton users. Hopefully, this will alert AOL to situations like this, “I had a problem where I couldn’t do X or kept seeing Y but then I terminated all the OCP processes and things went back to normal.”
Another problem users could have are lost shortcuts. Unfortunately, it is not so simple to recreate these at the moment (sans this tool.) The OCP has a generic launch tool, AOLLaunch.exe, that needs to know, at a minimum, the “moniker” of the application you want to start. Add in the fact that you have to specify the shortcut’s icon and you can see where this is going.
To help the inquisitive ones out there, I added some buttons to open Explorer in the install and data folders. The install folder contains the various DLLs, EXEs, UI files, and resources to run AIM Triton. The data folder contains a folder for each Screen Name (SN) with which you have logged-on. It is here where OCP applications store all your preferences, address book (cached from host), etc. I usually delete the folder with an SN name on it when I want to start over with the default set of preferences or get rid of the data for that SN. Note that you can lose data this way since some preferences, like away messages and font selections, are stored locally. Basically, anything you have to enter in every PC for the same SN is most likely stored locally and could get lost.
This is it for now. So far, this is definitely a tool QA (and developers on my team) would love. I welcome any comments, suggestions, ideas, bug reports, donated icons, etc.
