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Wednesday, January 31, 2007
On Friday I posted a screenshot of my Ambient Messaging widget for AIM. Widgets only work in AIM Lite for now, but that should definitely not stop you from checking out AIM Lite or my widget. So a quick review on AIM Widgets...
1) Plugins that are written in javascript (No Visual Studio, Yay!!!)
2) Widgets have the same access to the API as C++ or .net plugins
3) Uses the Boxely technology that AIM Lite and AIM 6.x are written in
4) Widgets are zipped up files with an "AWI" extension
5) Plugin loading and management is very similar to Firefox or Thunderbird extensions
Ambient messaging takes the IM conversation you are having, and goes out to Flickr to pull pictures, that are public, based on the conversation's context. For example:
GregsBlog: the colts are going to win the superbowl
gregtest4: I think da bears will cover the 7 points but come up short
In this conversation gregtest4 is using the ambient plugin. The initial conversation is about the Colts so we go out to flickr using their API to pull images with the tag "colts" and sort them based on relevance. The pictures load in the flickrBar and rotate in.
The request grabs up to 100 pictures at a time, so we will rotate through all 100 pictures over time. You can double-click on a photo and it will open the photo on flickr in your default browser.
OK, disclaimer time. This is truly an Alpha product. I have the context it is searching for limited to geography, sports and some other common key words. The good news is that all of this code can be viewed in notepad so if you want to add words or make changes you can, just change the extension from awi to zip. File installs into your AIM Lite directory, for most people (C:\Program Files\Lighter AIM) WARNING: If you make changes you will need to get your own developer key for AIM Plugins and replace the one in plugin.xml. I will be updating the widget to handle other photo sites and different viewing options, and of course I will change some of the context handling. I have to wrap the awi file in an executable to install two extra dlls to handle xml parsing and the url dispatching. In most other cases, AWI files can be shipped as stand alone files.
Download ambientMsg_0_1.exe.
As always feedback is appreciated.
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Ambient Messaging
Papa Roach - Forever
On Friday I posted a screenshot of my Ambient Messaging widget for AIM. Widgets only work in AIM Lite for now, but that should definitely not stop you from checking out AIM Lite or my widget. So a quick review on AIM Widgets...
1) Plugins that are written in javascript (No Visual Studio, Yay!!!)
2) Widgets have the same access to the API as C++ or .net plugins
3) Uses the Boxely technology that AIM Lite and AIM 6.x are written in
4) Widgets are zipped up files with an "AWI" extension
5) Plugin loading and management is very similar to Firefox or Thunderbird extensions
Ambient messaging takes the IM conversation you are having, and goes out to Flickr to pull pictures, that are public, based on the conversation's context. For example:
GregsBlog: the colts are going to win the superbowl
gregtest4: I think da bears will cover the 7 points but come up short
In this conversation gregtest4 is using the ambient plugin. The initial conversation is about the Colts so we go out to flickr using their API to pull images with the tag "colts" and sort them based on relevance. The pictures load in the flickrBar and rotate in.
The request grabs up to 100 pictures at a time, so we will rotate through all 100 pictures over time. You can double-click on a photo and it will open the photo on flickr in your default browser.
OK, disclaimer time. This is truly an Alpha product. I have the context it is searching for limited to geography, sports and some other common key words. The good news is that all of this code can be viewed in notepad so if you want to add words or make changes you can, just change the extension from awi to zip. File installs into your AIM Lite directory, for most people (C:\Program Files\Lighter AIM) WARNING: If you make changes you will need to get your own developer key for AIM Plugins and replace the one in plugin.xml. I will be updating the widget to handle other photo sites and different viewing options, and of course I will change some of the context handling. I have to wrap the awi file in an executable to install two extra dlls to handle xml parsing and the url dispatching. In most other cases, AWI files can be shipped as stand alone files.
Download ambientMsg_0_1.exe.
As always feedback is appreciated.
gregsblog at 4:32:00 PM EST Blog about this entry |
Add to del.icio.us | digg this
2/3/07 9:35 AM