The 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.
Twitterman sounds like a great plugin. Wouldn’t work for me though, since I like to put random things in my AIM status.
hey Greg – LOVE AIM 6.5… tryin to get all my friends to update. Quick question. I just installed Leopard on my Mac and it appears to not be playing nice with AIM/Windows clients… most of the people are still using old betas AIM 6.x (that did work with Mac 10.4 iChat) so haven’t tried the final AIM 6.5 release yet… but have you heard anything about Leopard iChat breaking Windows/AIM video chat compatibility?