Gus What?!

Just a quick post to let you know that I have updated my IM Control Panel and CoreWitness plugin. Basically, the IM Control Panel now supports AIM 6.1 and I added more details in the logging for secondary sessions in my CoreWitness plugin. See the respective links for more details.

I want to thank you all for your privately sent comments and suggestions for my RX-Plugin. I am prioritizing my list of new features to add and will be working on them soon. No ETA on when this will be out.

Finally, plugins 3 and 4 (as I am calling them) are in the early stages of development they should be interesting when they are done later this year.

I received a number of inquiries lately on how to get Idle Lock to work and some reports on it not working as well as it should. Therefore, I thought it would be a good time to gather these questions and answer them all in one place. Idle Lock is one of the more popular features in Gus Verdun’s RX-Plugin which works with AIM 6.0 and other Open AIM clients. Here is the description of it from the features list:

• Lets you immediately appear as idle while you continue to work at your computer.
• Idle Lock can be toggled via a user defined hotkey.
• A user defined initial idle time can be set when activating Idle Lock.
• Optional system tray icon can show you when Idle Lock is active.
• Can be automatically deactivated when you send an IM.
• Idle Lock can also be activated passively allowing you to continue to appear as being idle when you return.

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Since this is a new year, I thought it would be a great time to improve one of the original RX-Plugin rules.

The “goim” rule let you send a screen name as a link so that your buddy could click it in order to open an IM with that new buddy. Thus, saving your buddy the effort to copy and paste the screen name into an IM form.

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You can register and download this plug-in for free here. Click here if you have already installed this plug-in; then click on the “check for updates” button to get a link to download this version.

From the release notes:

• Added .calc command to open the Windows calculator.
• Added support for drag and drop with AIM 6. You can drag a buddy from your Buddy List and drop it in the Last Seen window to see the information for that buddy.
• Added an option to exclude a rule in chat rooms.
• Reduced volume of IMpulse sounds.
• Last seen now saves away messages for buddies that were already away at sign-on.
• Restructured the code to improve performance.
• Be sure to pickup the rule fixes below if you installed a copy prior to version 0.11.2.
• Versions prior to 0.11.2 have been disabled. Please update to the latest version.

Here is a screen shot just before I dropped “Gus Blog” in the Last Seen window which will then show the information for “Gus Blog”:

Let me know if you have any comments, suggestions, questions, or experience any problems with this plug-in.

Here are some screen shots of the new “Last Seen” feature in Gus Verdun’s RX-Plugin which is now available for download. See my previous post and the release notes for more information.

You can get the “Last Seen” information in an existing IM conversation with a buddy by sending “/ls” or “/lastseen” in an IM message as shown here (the message does not get sent to your buddy):

The information can also be shown in a live window (i.e. It gets updated automatically as the data changes.):

Here is how to show the “Last Seen” window for the buddy in an IM conversation:

You can also open it by right-clicking on a buddy as shown here:

Enjoy. As always, I am open to suggestions on how I can improve this or any other feature in this plug-in. Feel free to leave me a comment or e-mail me your ideas. Thanks.

I will be releasing a new version of Gus Verdun’s RX-Plugin tonight. I have some final testing to go through before I run it through my “Deploy Gauntlet”.

This build will have a new feature called “Last Seen”, which reports the current state (online, offline, idle, etc.), time since last seen, and what your buddy last said to you. You will be able to see this information in an existing IM window by sending “/ls” or “/lastseen” and also from the “People” menu in the IM form and the right-click context menu on a buddy. In the first case, the results will be shown in the IM conversation and from the other two menu options you will see this information in a window which will be updated automatically while it stays open.

In other news…

I will be posting a new plug-in this weekend. This one is geared more for plug-in and client developers and anyone interested in how Open AIM works.

See you back here tonight.

A new version of Gus Verdun’s RX-Plugin is now available. This release adds two new features: IM Trace and Dot Commands. You can use the IM Trace window to help you create and debug your own custom rules. The window looks like this:

As you can see, this is helpful in debugging your rules and also to see what the markup looks like when you send a particular message (this trace window shows what sending a smiley looks like; notice there is no image.). All of the parameters that go along with the IM are also displayed (Sans the expression items; i’ll add those in a later release.)

Dot commands are used to control parts of the RX-Plugin’s UI. You type them into any IM compose window and press send to invoke them. The plug-in will intercept these messages and process them without sending them to your buddy. You can now open the RX-Plugin Settings window by sending “.rx” in any IM compose window. The IM Trace window can also be controlled in this way. See the feature notes for more details. Enjoy.

Here is a rule that lets you IM someone a link to a Wiki page that they might want to see.

What you do is type an IM message that starts with “/wiki ” followed by the search term, e.g. “/wiki AOL Instant Messenger”

The rule will convert the text that follows “/wiki ” into a link that says “Wiki page on …”. where … is the text that followed “/wiki “.

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

NOTE: When you import a rule, it is placed at the bottom of the order. This means that it is the last rule the plug-in will convert. Since this rule consumes all of the text following the “/wiki “, I recommend that you move it to the top of the order. (Highlight the “EZ Wiki” rule and press the up button until it’s at the top. You can also highlight the rule and press CTRL + UP ARROW to move it via the keyboard.)

Here is is sample message to send: (after clicking on the above rule and clicking the apply button, click the link below and send it to yourself.)

/wiki AOL Instant Messenger

Here is what you and your buddy will see:

Enjoy. Let me know if you need help creating and sharing your own rules.

A new version of Gus Verdun’s RX-Plugin has been released. This release includes a new feature called Idle Lock, which I hope you will all enjoy. I welcome all questions and comments. See this link for more details.

I encourage you to try out the latest AIM 6 Beta. We have some great things in the works this month and I would really like to hear some of your feedback. So, if you have some spare time, please give it a try.

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.