A Lite Story

A few people have been asking me about AIM Lite as it has been over a year since we last did a release.  I wanted to take this opportunity to clear up some stuff with AIM Lite.  The idea of a light-weight AIM client pre-dates my 9+ years at AOL, by a few months, but it really came to surface in the winter of 2006 during the AIM Triton project.

When we created AIM Lite it was done as an exercise to improve the architecture that was used to connect Open AIM to the user interface elements.  Things like displaying IMs, rendering 1000 buddies in a Buddy List, and composing IMs were improved in AIM Lite.  Now much of that knowledge resides in the AIM client, and has been available to everyone since last year’s AIM 6.5 release.

AIM Lite also gave birth to a feature everyone benefited from in June of 2008.  AIM Lite featured a type of AIM Plugin called AIM Widgets (AWI).  These AIM Widgets led us to developing AIM Modules, which are a super set of AWIs in functionality and features.

I can’t say we will never touch the AIM Lite code base again, and for those who still use AIM Lite, we have no plans to decommission it either.  Hopefully this clears up any misconceptions behind AIM Lite, and if you are looking for a simple AIM experience, check out the AIM Express client.  The best part is that there is no download for the client, as long as Flash 9 is installed.

AIM Express 7…It’s Flashing Awesome!

I have been getting tons of feedback on the new AIM Express we launched last month.  The new application is really a great step forward for AIM.  Built on top of Adobe Flash and our ActionScript3 library, AIM Express gives you a rich messaging experience without having to download any software.  Since it is web base, you can use it on any supported browser (IE 6.0+, Firefox 2.0+, Safari 3.0+) with Flash 9.0.  The best part is when we want to upgrade the application, we can do it without popping annoying upgrade dialogs, etc.

If you are a developer, you can see the ActionScript library we used to build the application here.

If you just want to check out the client, it is here.

I Go On Vacation and Alot Happens

Tel Aviv Sunset
Going on vacation with the family and having no internet accessibility is always a challenge.  Awaiting my return was about 1000+ email I had to catch up on, then there were all my feeds to read, I also could not prepare adequately for my fantasy football draft this week which could hamper my fun over the next 18 weekends.

Apparently we did a whole bunch of releases while I was gone, so for now I will just post a summary, and get into more details in follow up posts.

  1. AIM Express 7.0 is now live and released.
  2. AIM 6.9 Beta 1 is available on our beta website
  3. AIM for Windows Mobile is out of beta and available for everyone to try.
  4. AIM MusicLink 4.0.0.0 has now over 1 Million users in just 25 days.
  5. AIM MusicLink now supports AOL Radio and Shoutcast Radio, for details check out the AIM MusicLink homepage.

I will dive into details on these releases over the next few days.

AIM Express Beta 3

Yesterday we released a new version of AIM Express Beta 3 that addresses a bunch of bugs as well as a few feature requests.

  • Improved connection & performance
  • Shortcut key to start a new IM with someone on or not on your Buddy List, use CTRL + /
  • Report Abuse on users who are IM’ing with threatening messages
  • Clear History in your IM from the right click menu on with IM window
  • We’ve added a dropdown menu on each IM window with some actions you can take for each buddy

Note: We are asking that everyone update to the latest version of Adobe Flash 9 for AIM Express, as Flash just recently fixed a serious security flaw.  As always we love to get feedback on this client, as the features above are a direct result of all the great feedback we are getting.

AIM Express 7.0 Beta

Today we are launching a new version of AIM Express. This version, 7.0 is a beta and is built on top of the Open AIM WimAS3 library that we released back in March as part of the Open AIM 2.0 announcement. This Adobe Flash based application allows you to use AIM any where you have an internet connection and not have to worry about downloading the full AIM 6.8 client.

As we posted on the beta website…

Although this application will work with most versions of Adobe® Flash® 9, we highly recommend you upgrade to the most recent version of Flash, as older versions have a serious security flaw. The upgrade is available here.

Check out AIM Express 7.0 Beta here.

Let us know what you think of AIM Express 7.