Greg’s Mind

I am headed back to ICQ tonight for the week, to work with the team in Tel Aviv. I did want to share an update with Zune support in AIM MusicLink. I found on Dan Fernandez’s blog info that Zune does have a basic API, via the ZuneDBApi.dll found in your Zune install folder. The API is a COM based API, but cannot be registered in the COM registry. The interfaces can be viewed in the object viewer in Visual Studio 2005 but I cannot successfully implement the interfaces in MusicLink.

I am hoping Microsoft churns out some real documentation for the Zune API, so I can add support for the player in MusicLink.

I am off to Tel Aviv and ICQ tonight so there will be only sporadic updates next week. Before I go though, one of my loyal readers mentioned that with the number of plugins available now, the Actions menu is getting crowded. We have been supporting multiple plugin command entry points for a while, but the latest AIM client built off of the Open AIM platform supports the following actions (to read all about plugin commands here is the documentation):

• AccCommandFlags_ActionsUi - command takes buddy names and will appear in Actions menus
• AccCommandFlags_BuddyUi - command takes buddy names and will appear in buddy context menus
• AccCommandFlags_GroupUi - command takes buddy group names and will appear in buddy group context menus
• AccCommandFlags_ImSessionUi -command takes IM session remote participant names and will appear in IM session menus (e.g., People menus)
• AccCommandFlags_PreferencesUi - command takes empty variant and will appear in Preferences/Setup UI
• AccCommandFlags_AboutUi - command takes empty variant and will appear in About box, plugin context menu or similar
• AccCommandFlags_PresenceUi - command takes empty variant and will appear in Presence UI

Now we also support flyout commands, via IAccCommand::put_Property(AccCommandProp_ParentId, …); For example here is the code from AIM MusicLink that could do the submenu support…

// Create Flyout Command Placeholder
CComPtr <IAccCommand> spiCommand;
piPluginInfo->AddCommand(kCommandId, &spiCommand);
CString menuCommand3;
menuCommand3.LoadString(IDS_ML_MENU_ITEM);
spiCommand->put_Property(AccCommandProp_Text, CComVariant(menuCommand3));
spiCommand->put_Property(AccCommandProp_Flags, CComVariant(AccCommandFlags_ActionsUi));

// add submenu by passing in the command ID of the above command

CComPtr <IAccCommand> spiSubCommand;
piPluginInfo->AddCommand(kShowLogCommandId, &spiSubCommand);
CString menuCommand;
menuCommand.LoadString(IDS_ML_SHOWLOG);
spiSubCommand->put_Property(AccCommandProp_Text, CComVariant(menuCommand));
spiSubCommand->put_Property(AccCommandProp_Flags, CComVariant(AccCommandFlags_ActionsUi));
spiSubCommand->put_Property(AccCommandProp_ParentId, CComVariant(kCommandId));

So as you can see we can easily manage the menus and keep them clean. I actually need to update a few of my plugins to take advantage of the flyout. As always keep the questions coming.

A few weeks ago we launched AIM Gallery. This site is the repository where you can find all the OpenAIM plugins, clients, bot, mashups that 3rd party developers are building. Instead of hosting my stuff on my blog, I can now push it to the Gallery. Of course we built a feedback mechanism into the Gallery so you can rank and comment.

I have been reading the feedback on the profile problems that have been reported. I need a little bit more follow up to understand what is happening. For the person who signs on at work and loses the profile from home, are both clients AIM 6.5? We made a change to the way profiles are handled by the client and how they interact with the AIM Cloud. Profiles now are stored on the host so when you sign offline the profile is still accessible via your AIM Page, etc. In old AIM clients, this was not the case. I am getting our QA to just sanity check a few things, during development there was a bug similar to what you guys are describing. We have discovered one issue, where if you sign on with AIM 6.5 and set a profile, sign off and then sign on, say at work with AIM 5.9, sign off, then sign on with AIM 6.5 back at home, if you view your profile it will still be there, but if you edit your profile it may be blank. As we get more details I will let you know.

Tomorrow I am off across the Atlantic to see ICQ in Tel Aviv. I will post a few pictures on the blog. Until then, have a good start to the weekend.