JAMS 1.5 Released (And Logging for All...)

JAMS 1.5, the newest set of plugins for AIM Triton, is now available. JAMS 1.5 works under AIM Triton Beta 3 and 4. For more information on JAMS, click here.

Lots of goodies in JAMS 1.5 (which is why it took so long):
* EZLogger - automatically logs your IM and chat room conversations (finally!) [screenshot]
* FightClub - AIM Fight against everyone on your buddylist at once! See who's regulating in your hood. [screenshot]
* Profiler (by Greg Cypes)- Set and edit your AIM profile.
* AVProps (by Steven)- Tweak the control knobs for voice and video sessions.
* MyTunes - iTunes is now supported in addition to WinAmp.

Update 09/06/2005: JAMS 2.0 for Triton Beta 5 will be out soon. If you are having problems with IMs not showing up in EZLogger, if possible email me a copy of the IM that was lost. We do a conversion from the funky AOLRTF format used by older AIM clients to XHTML 1.0, and the kinks in this converter are still being worked out.

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!

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?

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".

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.

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

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.