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!
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. 