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.

One of the most common question I get is what are we doing with operating systems other than Windows. Most people know that the AIM core platform that my team writes is cross platform, in other words it works on Mac, Linux, and Windows Mobile operating system, and of course Windows. Even better from a cross-platform point-of-view are the Web AIM APIs, which will work everywhere.

With this in mind here are two Apple related releases to check out. The first one, TinyBuddy, is not new, but definitely a helpful little application for iPhone and iPodTouch to send quick IMs to people without incurring the SMS charges. The latest TinyBuddy version 3.20, has the following improvements:

• Better performance for large buddy lists.
• One less prompt on sign-in and first IM sent.
• Better status message display (previously it did not show status messages, just away messages).
• Better information if you are signed off because Mobile Safari suspended the page for too long (happens if you switch to another application or web page).
• Uses Dojo 1.0 for the JavaScript toolkit.

You can check out TinyBuddy here: http://x.aim.com/ty/

Last week there was an article written by John Fronckowiak, about how he built a Mac OS X Dashboard Widget for AIM Fight. Using the AIM Fight interface John built a very slick widget that not only allows you to easily fight other SNs but also shows fighting history. Check it out here: http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/justforfun/aimfight.html