On Tuesday we posted the latest AIM for Mac client, Beta3, on our beta website. AIM for Mac was first released a month ago, and in that time we have made a bunch of changes. The application is built on top of the Open AIM Cocoa framework that is available as part of the Open AIM Mac SDK. Here are some highlighted changes in Beta 3:
- Redesigned Buddy List header area and added Quick Status and Away toggle
- Find Buddy search box is now toggled using the magnifying glass icon
- Will now auto-format phone numbers so users can send IMs to SMS text message capable phones**
- Fixed issue for Tiger users to correctly display status messages on the Buddy List
- Preference window will now remember size/screen position
- Fixed auto-accept file transfer preferences when user closes and reopens application
You can download AIM for Mac Beta 3 here.
As always we appreciate feedback on how this client is coming along.
** – I find it interesting that Google Talk launched IM to SMS as a very very burried feature in GTalk today. It will be 5 years on December 17th this year that we released IM to SMS for AIM. I along with our mobile team in Seattle and our AIM Host team in Dulles brought this great feature to the client oh so many years ago.
Why have you omitted A/V support? I regularly use iChat for video conferencing with AIM users and would like a more stable A/V client — iChat has some flaws and failures, while Skype (for example) is much more stable and reliable. So an AIM client that did video conferencing would be welcome.
I posted a comment here asking why video conferencing wasn’t in the Mac version of AIM. It appears to have been deleted. Is it a sensitive question? I’d still really like to know.
No secrets here. To be honest we are still working on features in the Mac client including a/v. The stack that we use for a/v is sipxtapi which is a cross platform open source solution. Hopefully you will see a/v along with other features like plugins in a future release.