Posts Tagged ‘AIM’

AIM 7.0 Beta 2 Now With AIM Lifestream

Monday, July 6th, 2009

AOL released the second beta of AIM 7.0 for Windows today. This build has a lot of changes since the first beta. While some are very noticeable like the new color/theme chooser and the Lifestream and Me tabs, others might not be so noticeable like the total footprint on disk was reduced by 3MB between the two betas. AIM 7 now installs in under under 15MB of disk space. By comparison (chosen totally at random), Digsby takes up 67.7MB on my PC.

Here is my Buddy List using the new “Grass” theme:

AIM Buddy List with Grass theme

There are a lot of cool and very new things to try out in this beta. AOL needs your help. If you find any issues or have some suggestions, be sure to click on the “Beta Feedback” link and leave a comment. The IM window has a handy “Beta Feedback” link at the top as shown here:

AIM Beta Feedback

Clicking on that link will open a browser window where you can leave your comments. Here is a screen shot of me leaving some feedback.

Sample AIM Beta Feedback

Remember, like saved away messages, you have to ask for the features you want in order to give them the attention you believe they deserve. Just make sure you ask for something you really want. Please comment early and often. The more details the better.

If you have not tried the first beta, be sure to try this one today.

Could it be the fastest AIM client yet?

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Posted in AIM, AIM Beta | 5 Comments »

AIM Blast Power User Tips

Sunday, January 11th, 2009

By now the web is buzzing with comments on AIM Blast. Don’t know what it is? AIM Blast is like an email list for IMs. You can create a permanent “blast group”, invite your friends, and then send/receive messages to/from all who are online at the time. It’s that simple. See the AIM Blast page for more details.

Blast groups appear as an automatically managed group in your buddy list. Once you have a blast group, just send an IM to the []-bracketed blast group buddy name.

You might have noticed that you need to reply with //1 or //2 when you receive an IM with the invitation to a blast group in order to accept or decline the invitation. It turns out there are many more commands that you can send to the blast group once you have joined.

Here is a list of additional commands you can send to blast group (NOTE: Most of these commands are handled by the host w/o being relayed to the blast group members):


//off
Stop receiving IMs. Use this when you are not interested in the current conversation. Don’t forget to send //on since this is in effect until then.

//on
Start receiving IMs again.

//invite name
Invite name to AIM Blast. An easy way to do this without having to go through the AIM Blast web site.

//history
Display last 10 IMs. This is an excellent way to check if you missed any recent blast messages.

//stats
Display stats

//soundon
Turn buddy sound on for the group

//soundoff
Turn buddy sound off for the group

//help
Get the list of // commands.

I found one more command that is not listed in the //help command and that is the //roll command to roll 2 six-sided dice; great for playing games and making random decisions via AIM Blast.

One last tip is that my Link Buddy plugin (also available from the AIM Gallery) has a link that gets you authenticated access to the AIM Blast web site so you don’t have to enter your password once you are signed-in to AIM.

Link Buddy Plugin

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Posted in AIM, Software Development | No Comments »

CoreWitness 1.1

Saturday, January 10th, 2009

I have released an update to my CoreWitness plugin for AIM. This version adds a few new features like the ability to pause and filter the messages being captured.

Here is a screen shot of the new filter dialog:

DAccEvents Monitor Filter

From this window you can select the messages you want to trace and click on apply, to activate your selection without closing the window, or OK to activate and close the window. You can save your selection as the default to be loaded at sign-on and when you click on load defaults button.

The contents of the event list will be updated as you type in the filter box to show just the events with the partial name. You can ctrl-click to select or de-select an event. The enable state of events not shown by the filter are preserved.

One last “feature” I added has more of a viral approach to getting the word out on this plugin (your help is appreciated). CoreWitness will push an activity to your buddy feed every time you install or upgrade this plugin. This will only be done if you have enabled the publishing of AIM Plugin installs in your privacy settings.

You can read more about this and download it on the Gus Verdun’s CoreWiteness Plugin-in web page.

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Posted in AIM, CoreWitness, Plugin | No Comments »

AIM Vote ‘08 Plugin for AIM 6.8+

Thursday, October 30th, 2008

I just wanted to highlight a new plugin that was recently added to the AIM Gallery. The AIM Vote ‘08 plugin lets you vote for Obama or McCain and then see who your buddies vote for. Your vote is only visible while you are online and you can change your mind at any time.

Here is a capture from the AIM Gallery Web page:

AIM Vote on the AIM Gallery

This plugin is all aces in my book; Best part is that I did not even write it but I know the man that did.

Just look at the face of your candidate when he is winning or losing. Well done “Tommy Gunn”!

Click here to go to the AIM Gallery site where you can download this plugin.

Enjoy and be sure to vote on November 4th.

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Posted in AIM, AIM Gallery | No Comments »

AIM 6.9 Beta 2

Tuesday, October 21st, 2008

AOL released the second beta of AIM 6.9 today.

This new build has some interesting changes as mentioned on the AOL beta site release notes:

  • Sign in as invisible is now an option in the sign in window — This check box is not sticky so you can’t check it and expect it to be checked the next time you sign in or out. This is a feature that was previously only available in my IM Tweaks plugin.
  • The UI has been streamlined. We have removed some of the redundant menus and options — Less is more or less :). Be sure to send feedback on what you like or don’t like here.
  • The buddy find feature is now similar to FireFox. Just press Ctrl+F from the Buddy List® window and begin typing the name of your buddy. You can close the find box to give yourself more room to show your Buddy List by clicking on the X button next to it.
  • Search the web from your IM window. Just enter a query in the search box to open your browser and see the results. AIM Search is “powered by AOL search” and “enhanced by Google”.
  • The AMO API continues to be improved in this version. Most of the changes are internal with a few API extensions. AIM 6.8 AMO plugins are also supported in AIM 6.9. I will cover some of these new API additions in a future post.
  • One new feature not mentioned in the official release notes is a new option in the context menu of the IM compose box (Ctrl+D) that allows you to “paste as plain text”. This makes it ultra-easy to paste web content without messing up your fonts.

Here is a screen shot of AIM 6.9 beta 1 and beta 2 Buddy List windows with some of the highlighted changes. As you can see we moved the IM, Buddy List config, and Actions menu to the top under the main menu bar and gave them new icons. All plugin commands that were in the Actions menu are now in the menu with the gear icon.

You can download the latest AIM beta here. Let me know what you think.

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Posted in AIM Beta | 2 Comments »

AIM SDK 1.6.7 Q&A Volume I

Monday, March 10th, 2008

A number of you are trying out the recently released AIM SDK 1.6.7. I thought it would be a good idea to answer some of the early questions. So here they are in my usual Q&A style…

Q: What SDK files do I need to run an Open AIM client or bot?
A: You need to copy some of the DLL files from the dist\release folder into your application’s folder. You can omit the jg*.dll files if you don’t need to support talk (aka voice) sessions with legacy AIM clients like AOL 9.x and AIM 5.9. You can also omit the sipxtapi.dll if you don’t need to support the newer SIP based Audio/Video sessions in AIM 6.x. You only need the accjwrap.dll and the accjwrap.jar files if your bot or client is written in Java. All other DLLs are required.

Q: What are all these new DLLs for?
A: We added support for SSL based encryption to Open AIM clients, which is based on NSS and NSPR from Mozilla. We also updated the audio/video stacks for full multimedia support in Open AIM.

Q: How do I enable SSL based encryption in my bot or client?
A: You can enable this via the boolean preference named “aimcc.connect.secure”. The default is false.

Q: What does SSL based encryption protect?
A: This encrypts all regular IM traffic between the client and the AIM host. It will not encrypt direct IMs, picture sharing sessions, A/V sessions, file transfers, buddy art retrievals and uploads, or alerts. Note: for end to end security your buddy also needs to be running a client that uses SSL encryption, like AIM 6.5.9.1.

If I did not answer your question, feel free to ask in a comment or post it in one of the forums.

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Posted in AIM, AIM Q&A, AIM SDK | No Comments »

Open AIM 2.0

Thursday, March 6th, 2008

Open AIMWith AOL’s recent announcement on Open AIM 2.0 now live and getting lots of great attention, I thought I should write a quick post on it. This is truly exciting news. We are dramatically expanding our community when we open things up like this. So with that, I want to say “Welcome” to all the great developers out there. Here is this incredible AIM network that you can now use and build on.

I have actually been a part of the AIM core team for a number of months now, so I am available to help answer questions on Open AIM. I can now claim to have written code in imapp.dll, acccore.dll, coolcoreXX.dll, and xprtX.dll. Lastly, this guy sits next to me.

There are more great things to come.

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Posted in AIM, AIM SDK, Software Development | 3 Comments »