Tuesday, April 26, 2005

Responses to AIM 6 Comments

A number of people wrote in with comments, I appreciate the feedback. I'll try to address some of them here briefly...
* Features - I can't stress enough that this is AN EARLY BETA (some of us would have called it alpha). Lots of things are missing. They'll appear in future betas.
* Memory footprint. Yes, it's big. Way too big for a final product. But it's not a final product, it's an early beta, we haven't done any tuning. The footprint will come down.
* Number of processes. We currently run different components as different processes to improve stability for this beta. This will change in future releases (and will help memory footprint as well).
* IE as renderer - we do very strict client-side filtering and run the incoming text through an XHTML converter to ensure a valid DOM, so I think we will be considerably more robust than AIM 5.9's creaky ATE control. In the event that we made a mistake, we have the ability to do server-side filtering as well.
* AIM for Linux... can't say too much now, but most of the Triton code is very portable, and may show up in another form in the future.

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

Are you guys putting the "My Info" back in? Lately in the new products that has been left out (like AIM Express). So I didn't know if you were taking it out.

But it looks amazing, I heard its gonna be part of some kinda software suite though. Maybe you can tell us a little about what thats gonna be? Because its kinda confusing.

Also, I like how you put the ad options in and how we get to pick (if you know how), I know thats probably going to be taken out, but it makes the buddy list look so much better. Maybe you can figure out somewhere else to put the ads, I understand they pay people like you, but the place they are in right now just doesn't fit.

But congrats on a great piece of software.

Anonymous said...

AIM for Linux isn't going to go anywhere unless the open source community builds it -- look at GAIM, woefully underpowered in terms of AIM, yet widely adopted because it is open source.  

Which is why I think the path to Linux should be to SDKify AIMcc and let the open source community build a UI of their own on top of it. I don't mean giving away COOL or AIMcc source, just making AIMcc and COOL LGPL and doing a good job of documenting the AIMcc layer and providing support.

It's a shame RedHat et al. have to resort to using GAIM or other clients based on libraries that reverse engineer OSCAR and don't provide nearly what AIMcc offers.

Anonymous said...

IMHO this was released as a 'beta' way to early then.  I reviewed on my blog (mainly pointing out what you said here) based on what I saw.  IMHO the current 5.9 as poor as it sometimes feels is still much more advanced.  The one thing I really didn't like was all the AOL Networking garbage.  Other apps do much better than any AOL product when dealing with NAT's, and UpNP... and they don't need so much garbage.  That bugged me more than anything.  Keep it lean.  Look at Firefox and it's methodology (why it is successful).

Anonymous said...

Looking forward toward's the next beta. =]

Anonymous said...

Heh should've read this post before I commented on your last one.

"* Memory footprint. Yes, it's big. Way too big for a final product. But it's not a final product, it's an early beta, we haven't done any tuning. The footprint will come down.
* Number of processes. We currently run different components as different processes to improve stability for this beta. This will change in future releases (and will help memory footprint as well)."

This is very good to hear, can't wait for future releases!

Anonymous said...

Am I missing something... Or have profiles been entirely removed from AOL 6? Me and my friends (and tons of other AIM users) LOVE the profile feature! What's up?

Anonymous said...

I personally find it EXTREMELY annoying to wait for the GUI animations. It's irritating, really. Perhaps in a future beta, included should be something to turn it off or perhaps an older-style GUI option.

Anonymous said...

is there anyway that one of the new features for AIM 6 could be logging? Because I know a lot of people are always downloading plug-ins for AIM just so that they can have their conversations Logged.

Anonymous said...

I'd have to agree whole-heartedly with the first comment. I myself use addon programs simply because I feel AIM doesn't (or hasn't so far) had all the features I'd really appreciate seeing. The addon that I use allows for skinning, buddy aliasing (so instead of seeing the actual screenname, you can see any name you want to give them. Quite helpful for remembering who is who sometimes), Tabbed IMs (which the beta seems to have so far, so that's a definite plus), and of course Logging.

The buddy aliasing, while convenient for me, isn't a huge necessity. Neither is the skinning. The logging on the other hand I find I use all the time to keep track of important things going on, what things were said, and such. Adding in an optional real-time log feature would practically eliminate my need for addons. By "real-time" I just mean that the log for each IM is written as each line is sent and/or received.

Looking forward to seeing if these things will be added or if I'll continue to need to keep looking for addons instead.

Anonymous said...

Whoops, I meant I agreed with the last comment. As in the one right below the one I typed before this one.