Monthly Archives: February 2008

Latest OS X Update and iChat

Posted on by
Reply

Apple recently released a system update for Mac OS X 10.5.2. Included in this release are a bunch of improvements for iChat that impact AIM.

  • Addresses an issue with simultaneously-logged in accounts in which iChat sounds generated from one account might be heard in another account.
  • Fixes an issue in which iChat idle time is affected by Time Machine backups.
  • Improves connectivity when running iChat behind a router that doesn’t preserve ports.
  • Enables logged chats from previous versions of iChat to open faster and more reliably.
  • Addresses an issue with text chats in which users may be unable to receive messages from the sender.
  • Addresses an issue that may prevent rejoining an AIM chat room without reopening iChat.
  • Addresses video chat compatibility issues with AIM 6 and third-party routers.
  • Fixes an issue with case-sensitivity of AIM handles.

Video interop between AIM and iChat should be much improved, check it out.  Here is the full change log.

Thoughts on Microhoo…

Posted on by
1

Its been a little quiet from me in the past month as we are working real hard on writing code.  There is a lot of exciting stuff happening in the AIM world, and you guys will start seeing it in the near future.  In the meantime, I thought I would pontificate on the MSFT/YHOO merger and what it means from an instant messaging/social network point of view.  MSFT/YHOO already have inter operable messaging clients, and the success or failure of the move is debatable.  Due to MSFT’s sheer number of employees working on client development, one must believe that the Live Messenger client will be the one to survive.  I question really how this looks to the end user at the end of the day.  The reason being, that where Yahoo IM is huge, Live is not and vice versa.  Do they still skin a version of the IM client one for Live, one for Yahoo?  It would be very weird where one day if you are a Yahoo user you no longer sign into the client with the Yahoo name space.

It will be interesting to see if this deal really does close.  As MSFT’s stock loses value it makes the deal less attractive to YHOO shareholders.  In the 12-18 months this deal will take to close, AIM/ICQ and others will continue to execute our plan of record.  Lastly, it has been said by many, but combining two companies as big as MSFT and YHOO and getting the synergies right, is a HUGE challenge.

AOL Radio 4.0

Posted on by
2

At the end of December we launched a new AOL Radio. Instead of being based on a pop up window that contains a flash player, the new radio is all javascript and HTML. In fact the player is such an improvement both usability wise as well as from a data mining point of view, I may now be able to add support to AIM MusicLink finally. If you navigate to http://radioplayer.aol.com, and have Firebug installed, you will be able to view how you can capture current playing song data like artist, title, and album via DIV tags. This opens up the possibility to writing a song logger for AOL Radio, just like the one I wrote for the Mac last year. You can view the code I wrote for the AOL Radio on Mac here.