07.03.08
It’s been a while! Time flies when you have a baby. Ayaan was born on January 19 and has been keeping us busy ever since.
Started a new job a few weeks ago with Aptela. They are a small company which provides business VOIP services. I am in charge of building and designing the UI for their web-based control panel as well as any upcoming consumer-facing applications. It’s been pretty interesting going from a huge corporation like AOL to a small 50 person company like Aptela. As with any job change, there is some adjustement, but overall I am pretty happy with the new position. There are a couple people there who I have worked with before so it helps with the transition.
All the work I am doing so far is in Flex, but I am already dabbling in SQL to analyze user metrics, and will also be learning Erlang, since it’s the language of choice for the back-end systems. Erlang is a functional language, and my only functional programming experience is a brief introduction to LISP about 9 years ago in college. It’s going to be fun learning some new stuff!
Posted in Miscellaneous at 10:09 pm by Osman Ullah
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05.19.08
I am happy to announce we have just released AIM Express 7.0 to beta! It’s a web-based IM client which is going to replace the current experience on aimexpress.com. This version is flash based and utilizes the wimas3 libraries I mentioned earlier. There is no installation required, so check it out on the beta site and and be sure to leave your feedback!
Posted in Announcements, Development, Flex at 10:10 am by Osman Ullah
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05.12.08
So this has been chugging along for a couple months now, but I never got a chance to blog about it. We have been working pretty hard on an Open Source AS3 (ActionScript 3.0) library which leverages the Open AIM Web Services. We finished wimas3 a couple months ago. This library will allow developers to easily integrate AIM functionality into any Flash application. So far, feedback has been really positive and we already have a few third party developers who are tinkering with the libraries and making contributions.
If you are interested in writing a Flash / Flex / Air application which leverages AIM, check out the Quick Start Guide. I haven’t received much feedback on it yet, so please let me know what you think!
Also remember, AIM isn’t just for IM. You can use the network for small data transfer which enables you to write multiplayer games that can do all communication via the AIM network. We have a Google Group set up, so please sign up and send out any questions you may have. We would love to hear from you!
Good luck and happy coding.
Posted in Development at 3:06 pm by Osman Ullah
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11.27.07
First order of business: I realized that the body really should have the white background, not the sidebar. I flipped them and it looks much better. The emphasis is where it should be.
Second: It’s been a while since my last update, but I think I might have some material which will allow me to post more regularly. I’ve started playing around with Flex, and I think I might finally be able to come up with some stuff to write. While it’s easy to put together something that runs pretty quickly, it is also very powerful and you can get really involved with doing some more advanced things like custom layout, custom skins, etc. As I delve deeper into the Flex world I expect I’ll be working on some things which will (hopefully) be interesting to others as well.
Overall, though, it seems that the Achilles heel of Flex for general use in rich internet apps seems to be the lack of proper HTML rendering. Without this, any kind of product which wishes to render HTML content in their application is kind of left hanging. Flex supports a few select HTML tags, but even something basic like showing an inline image is not possible without some really nasty hacks. Quite a few developers have written about this problem, but I hope as I get into the platform a little more I can share some thoughts on things which are a little more original. It’s a good start though. 
Posted in Development, Flex at 12:38 am by Osman Ullah
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06.12.07
So, Apple has released Safari for Windows into public beta. It’s an interesting endeavour by Apple. I am really wondering about their business reasons behind it. Do they want more market share for Safari? Are they planning on releasing some Safari-specific functionality on their websites? Do they think Safari is cool and slick enough to convince Windows users to try a Mac?
After using safari for a little while I really didn’t see anything that impressed me and would make me switch from IE7 or Firefox. Even though I know it’s a public beta, there are few things missing which really made me raise my eyebrows. There are almost no window borders. On an XP machine this can make the window get lost amongst the other applications. You can only resize the window from the bottom right, but even then the cursor doesn’t change to a resize indicator until you actually press down the mouse button. They say it’s faster than IE7 or Firefox but honestly the way IE and Firefox render pages seems to be “smoother” and less “choppy” than Safari…and Safari didn’t seem any faster. You can only download data so fast, correct? Also on my HP laptop I press both mouse buttons down at the same time to auto-scroll; this doesn’t work in Safari. And there are no tooltips! Bad bad bad! Releasing a brand new product (to windows users, at least), and you can’t even hover over buttons to find out what they do. I am sure Apple knows how important tooltips are for discoverability and exploration, and I am really intrigued that such an important feature was missed. I guess they figured since they only have 2 or 3 “ambiguous” buttons, it wasn’t worth the effort?
Anyway, otherwise it feels quick and smooth. I wouldn’t switch though. It will be interesting to see what happens with Safari for Windows, to say the least.
Posted in Miscellaneous at 9:54 am by Osman Ullah
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04.02.07
Well, it looks like Greg found out how to turn on the black skin I was working on before we shipped AIM 6.1. It wasn’t quite done yet but everyone seems to love it so I thought I would give it a mention. Follow the link to his blog for instructions.
Posted in Miscellaneous at 10:28 am by Osman Ullah
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03.28.07
AIM 6.1 was launched yesterday. It has a lot of bug fixes as well as some new features, including buddy list docking and skinning. Be sure to let me know what you think about skinning (leave a comment for now). The Buddy Profile window is also cleaner, smaller and easier to read. Overall it’s a pretty minor release. Look for some more interesting stuff later this year. I would recommend anyone using 6.0 upgrade to 6.1 today
Posted in Miscellaneous at 10:41 am by Osman Ullah
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03.06.07
I came across this interesting article on 5 ways to make crap code worse. Very entertaining, and it also gives any programmer some stuff to think about.
An interesting question for me is when do you draw the line between fixing really, really ugly code and just leaving well enough alone? Sometimes you are fixing old, worn out duct tape by piling on more, but just as bad, duct tape.
Posted in Development, Miscellaneous at 8:47 am by Osman Ullah
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02.15.07
So Yahoo! has gone and integrated IM with mail, and it looks like they did a pretty slick job.
However, from what I can tell in the video, they haven’t found a solution to the big problem: bridging the gap between the desktop and the web. If the user has a desktop client running at the same time, I can’t help but feel like the experience is broken. Some of the user’s conversations will be taking place in the client and some will be taking place through the web. How is the user supposed to manage and/or consolidate these different conversations?
Not only that, but due to the inherit limitations of HTML, the web experience is going to be vastly different from the client experience (unless you want to dumb down your client experience to match, which doesn’t make any sense to me). So not only does the user have conversations in different places, she also has to deal with different behaviors and capabilities depending on where the conversation is taking place.
No matter how smooth the implementation, I don’t really think the integration of Webmail and IM will ever be complete unless this hurdle is overcome.
Posted in Development at 7:04 pm by Osman Ullah
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We had the first “bad” snowstorm since I moved up here in July 2004. It snowed. Then there was sleet. All day. So basically our driveway has 2 inches of solid ice. It looks like snow until you hit it with a hammer and it barely chips. The problem is I don’t have a shovel or salt to remove the ice…I feel like a total n00b. Here are some pics.
BTW, if you know of a Wordpress plugin which makes it easy to add images with thumbnails please let me know.
Posted in Miscellaneous at 12:37 am by Osman Ullah
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