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.
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
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.
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.