Thursday, July 28, 2005

And Blogging For All... For Real Now

The green light has officially been given... from Employee Central [AOL employees only]...

"As AOL employees, are we allowed to blog? Yes. However all of the policies and guidelines that pertain to how you conduct yourself as an employee also apply to blogging."

If you are blogging or thinking about blogging, be sure to read the full statement. It boils down to 3 simple concepts - don't disclose private information, don't bash co-workers, and don't try to speak for AOL to the media.

Have fun!

Wednesday, July 27, 2005

AIM Fight Hacks

It didn't take long for people to start doing neat stuff with AIMFight. "DosBubba" on Slashdot was the first one I saw to uncover the (unofficial) web API used by the aimfight.com page:

http://aimfight.com/getFight.php?name1=SCREENNAME1&name2=SCREENNAME2

The returned data is of the form

&success=1&score1=132451&score2=6004&oscore1=27241&oscore2=0&height1=99&height2=4

where:
"success=1" -> both names were valid
"score1=132451" -> score of name1
"score2=6004" -> score of name2
"oscore1=27241" -> name1 was ranked with a rank of #27241
"oscore2=0" -> name2 not ranked
"height1=99" -> relative height of name1's vertical bar
"height2=4" -> relative height of name2's vertical bar

"jcuervo" quickly came up with a Perl wrapper, and "DBergere" wrote a shell script wrapper. "timdorr" even wrote a Mac OS X Dashboard widget.

Dashboard users may also want to check out this widget, which displays selected buddies on your desktop. Pretty neat, but would be even better if it could display the buddy icon as well... which seems like it should be easy to do if you have read this post. Anyone feeling brave?

Friday, July 22, 2005

AIM Triton Beta 4

Version 0.4.7 of Triton is out. You can download from http://beta.aol.com/projects/tritonbeta/index.html. I've moved up to it and it has a number of nice tweaks from the previous beta.

JAMS 1.0 continues to work with Beta 4. However, I have noticed two issues:
* When using Colorizer, the second IM sent out in a session does not get colorized. This is because AIM Triton generates bad FONT tags (before the BODY element) in the second (and apparently only the second) outgoing IM. I will need to talk to the UI guys about that one.
* LWAway can cause Triton's UI to crash. I haven't figured it out exactly, but receiving an IM when LWAway has put the client into "away" mode seems to cause the Triton UI to tube. I suggest disabling LWAway for now until we can get this sorted out.

I'm heading off to AOL Germany next week, and will be at IETF-63 in Paris the week after that, but will be releasing JAMS 1.1 shortly (hopefully). Been pretty busy, so the only real new feature is that MyTunes now will support iTunes.

One last note - been playing around with the ATOM protocol exposed by AOL Journals. Pretty powerful stuff! I made a simple javascript that allows you to enter a screenname and dumps out all journals for that name, along with their last modified date. You can get the source here - run it from the command line like "cscript atomtest.js juberti".

Tuesday, July 19, 2005

AIM Fight!

AIM Fight is now officially live! Find out how popular you are in the AIM universe, and compare to a friend! (Sorry Greg, I had to go up against someone).

For the developers out there, this is an example of some of our new AIM server APIs that we expect to make public in the near future.

Update: As a bonus of our shared backend, AimFight also works for ICQ numbers.


Tuesday, July 12, 2005

Blog from the Beach

Out on vacation this week... couple quick things I heard about that you should check out...

Watch the space shuttle launch on aol.com

Wednesday, July 6, 2005

More AIM Presence Indicator Stuff

scottp00010 wrote in with some PHP code he wrote to generate different output from a webserver based on whether the target user is online or offline. Less hacky than the javascript solution I posted a couple months ago. He has code for the AIM version and an ICQ version - these could also be condensed into a single version by checking the first character of the screenname and going to big.oscar.aol.com if a letter, or status.icq.com if a number.

Update:
Scott has posted a new version that supports both AIM and ICQ as described above.

Friday, July 1, 2005

AIM Plugins

A while back I blogged about how AIM Triton would support plugins. And we've made several statements to that effect in the press. Well, we've been working on our plugin support for many months, and so I can report that every version of Triton released so far has supported plugins... but unfortunately, there is so much stuff that we are working on for Triton, that we haven't had time to get a nice UI for plugins done.

OK... so where is this all going? I'm pleased to announce version 1.0 of Juberti's AIM ModificationS (JAMS), the first set of plugins for AIM Triton. As an example of the flexibility of Triton's plugin API, the user interface for managing plugins is implemented as... a JAMS plugin.

Note: JAMS 1.0 requires AIM Triton Beta 3. If you install JAMS under AIM Triton Beta 2, you will probably find that AIM Triton no longer works. If you have any problems using JAMS 1.0, an uninstaller is included.

Once you install JAMS, the next time you sign on with AIM Triton, you will see this icon -> in your system tray. If you double-click it, it will bring up the plugin management UI. From there you can enable, disable, or configure any of the installed AIM Triton plugins.

Besides the plugin management plugin, JAMS 1.0 includes the following plugins (note that plugins are disabled by default, and need to be manually enabled through the plugin UI)
* Colorizer - automatically applies a color to your outgoing IMs and chat messages that changes over time.
* LWAway - automatically sets AIM as away when you lock your workstation (for Win XP users, Windows Key + L), and comes back when you unlock.
* MyTunes - automatically adds the current track you are listening to in WinAmp to your AIM profile and status text. (Will support AOL Media Player and iTunes in the future)

None of these plugins are particularly awe-inspiring, but they are a bunch of useful toys that we were able to write in less than a day, and they show just some of the things you can do in just a handful of lines of code with the AIM Triton plugin API. We'll be adding to and enhancing JAMS throughout the AIM Triton beta cycle to show off other neat things that you can do. Note that JAMS is written using C++ and ATL, but the plugin API is COM/IDispatch and so supports any COM-compatible language.

So... many of you are probably wondering... "when can we write plugins for Triton?"
We're working on a developer site right now, where we will be publishing the AIM Triton plugin API, a tutorial for writing a "Hello World" plugin, and the source code for JAMS. Look for it in the coming weeks...

If you've read this far... we are looking to hire a contractor to write AIM Triton plugins for the next several months. If this sounds like fun to you, you live in the Washington DC area, and you have ~5 years of C++ experience and 2 years of COM/ATL experience (plugin experience would be great too), send me a resume and sample code if possible.