Quite a busy day. Download at http://beta.aol.com./projects/tritonbeta.
Wednesday, May 25, 2005
AIM profile size increased
One of the most-requested AIM improvements has finally occurred - the
AIM "profile" size has been increased from 1K to 2K. Away message size
is increased to 2K as well, although you will have to use AIM Triton to
set a > 1K away message.
Tuesday, May 24, 2005
Detecting AIM from a web page
One of the engineers on my team, Greg Cypes, gave me some HTML that can
be used on a web page to detect whether AIM is installed. Really simple
stuff that can be easily integrated into almost any webpage. You can
check it out at this link,
do "View Source" to see the few lines of Javascript that do the actual
detection. Unfortunately, it doesn't yet work with AIM Triton, although
I am sure we will solve that before it is done.
Update: May 25, 2005 3:58 PM EDT
OK, I was wrong. The AIM detect script I posted works with IE and Netscape 4.7, but with Mozilla/Firefox, it doesn't detect AIM 5.9. Somehow the setup of the application/x-aim MIME type got busted in AIM 5.9 (maybe also in 5.5). Hopefully we can get this fixed for the AIM 5.9 refresh.
Update: May 25, 2005 3:58 PM EDT
OK, I was wrong. The AIM detect script I posted works with IE and Netscape 4.7, but with Mozilla/Firefox, it doesn't detect AIM 5.9. Somehow the setup of the application/x-aim MIME type got busted in AIM 5.9 (maybe also in 5.5). Hopefully we can get this fixed for the AIM 5.9 refresh.
Thursday, May 12, 2005
AIM Mail is out!
More good stuff today! AIM Mail, free email for AIM users, launched today at http://mail.aol.com! Simply log in with your existing AIM screenname to get a free 2 GB aim.com mailbox with:
• AOL's excellent spam and anti-virus protection
• An awesome web front end with search
• Or, if you want to use a mail client, IMAP access
• Single Log-on - logging into AIM allows lets you seamlessly login to AIM Mail
• AIM presence integrated into email so you can see if the sender or recipients are online
• AOL's "Unsend" and "Message Status" features
• And more!
It's a great product! Check it out at http://mail.aol.com.
• AOL's excellent spam and anti-virus protection
• An awesome web front end with search
• Or, if you want to use a mail client, IMAP access
• Single Log-on - logging into AIM allows lets you seamlessly login to AIM Mail
• AIM presence integrated into email so you can see if the sender or recipients are online
• AOL's "Unsend" and "Message Status" features
• And more!
It's a great product! Check it out at http://mail.aol.com.
Monday, May 9, 2005
250 Buddies!
I've said it before - there's going to be a lot of great stuff coming out of AOL this summer. Today's improvement is a new buddylist limit of 250 buddies per list (up from 200).
Also some folks have been asking about AIM Triton: is it AIM 6, or is it part of a software suite? The answer is: both. It's the successor to AIM 5.9; the latest AIM 5.9 version with AOL Browser will be the last version from the AIM 5.9 codebase. AIM 6 is also one of the first of a suite of applications (AOL Browser is another) built on top of our core platform and with our Boxely UI toolkit. I don't know whether AIM 6 will actually be called "AIM 6" when it has its final release - that's something the marketing people will decide.
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.
* 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.
Monday, April 25, 2005
AIM 6 Beta 1 Released!
OK, we've decided to release the first beta of AIM 6 (AKA "Triton") to the public!
http://beta.aol.com/projects/tritonbeta/
Note that this is a very early beta, of a product that is a complete rewrite... it's not very polished in a lot of places. The standard disclaimers about beta software definitely apply here.
That said, you can see it's going to be a really good product. A whole new UI engine, called "Boxely", IE as the IM renderer, a new IM library called AIMcc with plugin support - we've got a solid foundation to develop on.
For those interested in the plugin API - take a look at the type library in acccore.dll. Plugins aren't exposed in this beta, and the API isn't final, but you can get an idea of what is going to be supported by this API.
http://beta.aol.com/projects/tritonbeta/
Note that this is a very early beta, of a product that is a complete rewrite... it's not very polished in a lot of places. The standard disclaimers about beta software definitely apply here.
That said, you can see it's going to be a really good product. A whole new UI engine, called "Boxely", IE as the IM renderer, a new IM library called AIMcc with plugin support - we've got a solid foundation to develop on.
For those interested in the plugin API - take a look at the type library in acccore.dll. Plugins aren't exposed in this beta, and the API isn't final, but you can get an idea of what is going to be supported by this API.
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