Posts Tagged ‘OpenAIM’

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Mashup Help

Tuesday, November 20th, 2007

I am a big proponent of mashups, both in music and in technology. In music, nothing beats a great rock anthem mixing it up with some hip-hop, ala Jay-Z and Linkin Park years ago. In the technology world, taking two things that were not designed to go together, and make it work, is actually kind of cool. To make Flickr work with AIM is definitely something we never had intended. In fact mashing up a COM based API and make it work with Javascript is very “Frankenstein-ish, no way engineers at Microsoft thought about that when they started writing COM/ATL years ago.”

Those who have followed my blog and what I am doing on AIM, and AOL knows that I have written a lot of code that mashes up not only AOL properties but other stuff out on the web. I have sporadically shared my code with you on the old blog, and now I want to give everyone a better access to the stuff I have written. I have set up a page where you can view the code I have written and some tutorials I have given. You can check out the page here. Use the code as a reference to help build mashups of your own with AIM and the AIM network. I will be adding some samples up on the website in the near future.

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Posted in Open AIM | 4 Comments »

New TwitterMan and Colorizer is Fixed!

Thursday, November 15th, 2007

I am releasing a new version of TwitterMan version 3.0 that works seemlessly in AIM 6.5. The widget, will listen for when your status updates in the AIM 6.5 client, and if you are authenticated to Twitter, will automatically update with the new status. If you are not authenticated, then the plugin will prompt you for Twitter authentication, then store the credentials for the lifetime of the session. The widget can be downloaded here, and as always feedback is appreciated. This plugin works with AIM 6.5 and better.

Many people have been pinging me this week asking why the Colorizer plugin stopped working. Well we hit the monthly rate limit on the key, which happens to be 2 Million sessions. So first thanks to everyone who is using colorizer, and second, the key is now unlimited so we should not have any more issues with it. For those who are wondering what Colorizer is, it is a plugin written by Justin Uberti back in 2005 when he and I were building JAMS (which were a suite of plugins that we wrote to test the OpenAIM API). Colorizer changes your out going IM text to appear as different colors to your buddies. Each IM results in a different color being sent.

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Posted in AIM, Open AIM | 6 Comments »

Mashup Camp Dublin

Sunday, November 11th, 2007

Facing jet lag and two presentations, one on Open AIM and one on Open Auth, I really debated just staying in bed all day. I did definitely get out of bed and headed to the Guinness Storehouse to see how Europe handles the Mashup world. John Herren opened the proceedings by explaining Mashup culture and how to get started. John is the Mashup king, he won the competition in Boston earlier this year. John Musser from Programmable Web gave the keynote yesterday afternoon and dove into how the Social Media API world is exploding with new APIs on a daily basis. While heavily pimping OpenSocial, he managed to give props to others like AIM for leading the way in the messaging API world.

In my two sessions I covered the client side of Open AIM by showing how easy it is to make a plugin, and some excellent examples out there today. In addition I showed how all messaging clients are built off of Open AIM, whether it be accsample included in our SDK, or AIM Lite or AIM 6.5, at their heart they all start off the same way. I also managed to squeeze in some time to show off AIM Tunes, and was successful in streaming U2’s Where the Streets Have No Name (apropos for Dublin, since street signs are non-existent) from my computer in Bethesda, Maryland across the Atlantic over conference WiFi in the Guinness Storehouse. Needless to say, that demo got a round of applause.

Since we are at the most famous brewery in all of the world, we were given free Guinness and a trip to the top of the factory for beers at the Gravity Bar and a view of Dublin. Coming up today is a presentation by fellow AIM-er Stephen Benedict where he will talk about Open AIM via the Web AIM APIs.

Gravity Bar @ Guinness Storehouse

Gravity Bar @ The Guinness Storehouse

Presenting on Open AIM Bots

Presenting on Open AIM Bots

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Posted in AIM Tunes, Open AIM | No Comments »

Thoughts from across the pond.

Saturday, November 10th, 2007

I am over in Dublin for the weekend to give a couple of presentations at MashupCamp, and to do a presentation at our AOL offices. If you are in the Dublin area or at the conference make sure to stick around until after lunch, have a beer, and come listen to a talk about Open AIM and OpenAuth.

I already see there is some feedback on the latest AIM MusicLink I released on Thursday, and I have tried reproducing a few of the issues reported. Namely that iTunes 7.5 results in the song playing not appearing in your status or profile. I downloaded iTunes 7.5.0.20 and with the latest AIM MusicLink and the latest AIM client, I had no issues. I am planning on looking at Windows Media Player 11 to see if something broke, but again it is an API that SHOULD be backward compatible. Make sure you are setting your preferences, and that you are not setting yourself as away, and everything should be working.

I will be posting my presentations from today on the blog later today so check back tomorrow and they will be up there. In addition, I have added some of my older presentations from 2006 to page, so if you want to see what was going on back then, you can now reference them.

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Posted in AIM MusicLink, Open AIM | 1 Comment »

New AIM MusicLink

Thursday, November 8th, 2007

UPDATE 6/9/08 11:00PM EST - The latest AIM MusicLink can be found at the home of AIM MusicLink. (http://www.gregsmind.com/musiclink)

I finished up a new version of AIM MusicLink version 2.0.0.4 last night based on feedback I was getting on the previous release. In version 2.0.0.4, I have added support for MediaMonkey, so AIM MusicLink now supports 7 different media players:

  • iTunes
  • WinAmp (version 5.5)
  • Windows MediaPlayer (version 10+)
  • Yahoo Jukebox
  • Real Player
  • Songbird (must manually install included extension)
  • MediaMonkey

I have also fixed a few bugs. First the situation of the first character being cut off. I had real trouble reproducing a case where I saw this, but I figured during streaming of music to WinAmp or Yahoo is where this would occur. In addition I fixed a problem where your status could be set to “[Buffering…” if you were listening to AIM Tunes songs in WinAmp. I also added an “About” screen via the new IAccCommand flag AccCommandFlag_AboutUi.

Here is the new about screen:

To access the preferences click the actions menu as shown and choose “AIM MusicLink Preferences”

Once you set the preferences you will start seeing your status and profile updated like this:

You can download the plugin here and as always I appreciate any feedback you guys have.

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Posted in AIM, AIM MusicLink, Open AIM | 44 Comments »

Open AIM 1.5

Wednesday, November 7th, 2007

We posted Open AIM 1.5 today on developer.aim.com. This new update represents the same Open AIM engine that AIM 6.5 launched with earlier this month. Here are some of the changes we have made from Open AIM 1.3, the full release notes can be found here:

  • In the Java Wrapper we updated to current AIMCC APIs.
  • Support for sub menu plugin commands, so now you can have a plugin command menu item that is a fly out. (Note that the AIM 6.5 client will be adding this support in the next release, so you will not see sub menus until that release.)
  • Added a new property for user and session called AvTrack. This property is used for extended info for the current video or audio track that is playing in your media player.
  • In addition to the property we added for AvTrack, we added an interface for the AvTrack so you can pass up the data easily to the host.

As always the SDK contains plenty of samples and our documentation is live on the web here. If you have questions or feedback you can leave them on our message boards.

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Posted in Open AIM | No Comments »

Are We Still Doing AIM Betas?

Saturday, November 3rd, 2007

The most popular question I have been getting lately has been regarding AIM Betas and whether we will be releasing betas in the future. I guess it has been made known that some members of our beta team were impacted by last month’s changes. In my 8+ years working on AIM we always have done betas and I can assure you this will continue. We will still be getting your feedback via the usual channels, beta.aol.com, my blog, forums, and Report-A-Bug. In fact we are working on a release right now, and it will makes it way out the door very soon. I encourage everyone if they have questions to leave comments below or send me an IM using AIM Wimzi on the right side of the screen. Next week we will have some Open AIM news. Have a great weekend, and enjoy Super Bowl 41.5 tomorrow.

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Posted in AIM, Open AIM | No Comments »

Happy Halloween

Wednesday, October 31st, 2007

For a while people have been asking me for access to the presentations I have done over the years. Well, they were posted internally at AOL for the past few months, but now that I have the new blog, I am posting them publicly. You will find all the talks I have given here in 2007. You will notice that I will also be taking all the code samples that I posted on the old blog here and the plugins link will point to the AIM Gallery. To find this page later, there is a link in my blog roll section.

One thing that I have not blogged about but definitely deserves some attention is AIM Tunes. We included a plugin in the AIM 6.5 release we did at the beginning of the month that allows you to you to listen to music from your buddies. It’s as simple as that. Check out http://x.aim.com/music for more information! We put together a little tutorial to show you how easy it is to use. From a technical perspective, the plugin takes advantage of AIM’s Open API using IAccCustomSession interface. As always we love to get the feedback from you guys on how we are doing.

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Posted in AIM, AIM Tunes, Open AIM | No Comments »

AIM Gallery and Profile Questions

Friday, October 19th, 2007

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.

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Posted in AIM, ICQ, Open AIM | 3 Comments »

AIM 6.5

Thursday, October 18th, 2007

AIM 6.5 BLThe past few weeks have been a barn burner. We released so many different things it makes me wonder what are we not doing. In this blog post I am going to focus solely on the AIM 6.5 release. Those who have found it at aim.com (and there are many people who already have) can attest this release continues to positive trend of improvements to the client and the Open AIM platform.

The difference between AIM 6.1 and AIM 6.5 is quite significant. We have tried to bubble up some existing technology to give it more prominence in the client. For example, the ability to send SMS text from AIM to your buddy’s cell phone is much easier, and is of course free in the US. We also now support status messages in the buddy list. Status has been part of the platform for a few years, if you have ever used iChat on a Mac you would have seen their implementation of it. I used the status API in the AIM MusicLink plugin I wrote as well as TwitterMan where you can set your status in AIM and Twitter at the same time. Status is a great way to share with your buddies what you are up too.

In AIM 6.5 we of course have full support for expressions and we made a bunch of good improvements to audio and video.

There are a few other features in this release, but I am saving those for their own blog posts.

IM Window

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Posted in AIM, Open AIM | 2 Comments »

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