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!
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.
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. 
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.
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.