Gus What?!

Been working long hours the past couple of weeks plus doing some home finishing projects around the house.

It’s crunch time at the office. I will be very busy for the next few weeks. This is where the fun is. I like it when you get to do things that you have never done before and see it all materialize progressively in front of you. I get better at it each time. It’s incredible fun to be in a controlled chaos mode. I highly recommend it. This is when you stop looking at the clock unless it’s after 9PM. I wish every day was like this at work; at least let it be 6PM when I take that first look at the clock.

PeerSketch is limping along in all this. I have not completely abandoned it yet. Rest assured, it will simply be advancing at a slower pace than expected.

I will formally start the development of PeerSketch this Sunday night (7PMish EST). You can get instant updates on my current activity on twitter. More detailed development updates will be posted here. The rest of this posts covers the technology I will use, how AIMcc supports this plug-in, and some of my first steps.

This plug-in will be developed in C++ using ATL and WTL for the application UI. All drawing will be done via GDI+ which exists on Windows XP and above (Microsoft provides an installer for older OSs like Windows 2000). Expat will be used for XML based data transfer. Lastly, AIMcc will provide the plug-in and custom session support.

You send and receive pictures, files, voice, video, etc. to and from your buddy with AIM. These features make use of a common transport mechanism that handles firewalls, does authentication, manages the connection, and transfers the data. One of the unique features in AIMcc is the ability to create custom sessions that take advantage of this transport mechanism in a custom way. You can use it to implement your own version of file transfer or create new interactive sessions of any kind. I will be using this support for this plug-in. You can read more about it here. The complete documentation for AIMcc is here.

The first things I will do is develop a “proof of concept” plug-in and a test environment. The plug-in will exercise the custom session support in AIMcc and answer some questions on the performance and data formats I will get in the two modes I plan to use custom sessions in, which are, Offer/Answer and Stream. Each mode has some trade-offs that I want to identify. The test environment will be a standalone application that I will use to test the drawing and communication functions before I make them a plug-in. This will make it easier to test. As you can see I have plenty to do.

See you Sunday night on Twitter.

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.