Precious, Precious AIM

One of the only things I was ever jealous of with Sidekick users was their seamless integration with AIM. My Sidekick friends are identified on iChat with the ubiquitous “Mobile (Hiptop)” tag next to their name. At count right now, its four people on my buddy list that are on Sidekicks (including my sister, a rap-star/comedian and my realtor). I hate the Sidekick with passion because it just is so… Sidekick, but I wanted AIM on my Blackberry 8700C.

I tried IM+ and Rabble, and while both got me on AIM, they did not necessarily always keep me on AIM. After trying IM+ for a few days, my sister complained that I kept signing on and off on her Sidekick. Device wars? Possibly so. Sibling rivalry through AIM? Yes. It also had the pesky problem of sucking the life out of batteries, just like Agile did on my PPC-6700.

My Blackberry died earlier this week (bad speaker), so when my new one arrived I had to reinstall all the apps. Instead of reinstalling IM+ (which I had paid for) I decided to download Google Talk and try that out.

Amazing. I have a GTalk account, and exactly one person who uses it that I know. Chatting with him on it was the same as using BlackBerry Messenger, which is to say, a good experience. Then I remembered that Jabber (which GTalk uses at base) can also have gateways into other services. And look what you find at BlackBerry Forums… a link to detailed instructions on how to do this.

Of note here: the screenshots are of WIndows Vista, but I was able to download PSI for the Macintosh and do this just as easily. Also ursine.ca (a bear fetish perhaps?) didn’t work, so I used jaim.at as my Jabber server. Once I registered onto their AIM gateway, all my buddies from AIM showed up awaiting authorization to add to my Jabber buddy list. All 120 of them. I had to approve all individually. That kind of sucked.

However, once that hurdle was passed, I signed off from PSI, and signed back on on the Blackberry and all my AIM buddies were there. username@aim.jaim.at is the format they show up as. Some quick testing proved that every feature we like on AIM works (away and status messages), and it has seamless communication with the Jabber server.

So now when I sign off from a computer, I can immediately sign on the Blackberry and use a status message “Mobile (BB8700)” and just appear that much cooler on everyone’s buddy lists.

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2006
07/22
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  1. August 1st, 2006
    Trackback from : insignificant thoughts » Blog Archive » links for 2006-08-01

Asides

    Andreas Schlegel currently lives in Singapore. He likes to write programs that generate audio, visual, and physical output. He enjoys doing projects with syntfarm.

    via sojamo.de

    Posted via web from ethank's posterous

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    ["Five measures prove to be useful: A, the area of the isovist, which gives us a measure of size (in 3-D this is a volume); P, the perimeter of the isovist, which gives us a measure of the boundary length (in 3-D this is an area) excluding the horizon and excluding Q, which is a measure of the length (area) of the radial, component of the isovist boundary; M2, which is a statistical measure of the variability of the boundary’s distance from x; and M3, which is a measure of the asymmetry of M2." From Benedikt]

    If we dimensionalize the data from any given social framework online, could we apply isovistic theory to the quantification of perceptual awareness around a user in this textually augmented reality we now find ourselves?

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    Infra-mince, Duchamp declared, cannot be defined, but can only be described by examples, such as the difference in displaced volume between a clean shirt and the same shirt worn once, or the taste of one's mouth lingering in exhaled smoke.

    Infra-mince was a new way to think about physical and temporal dimensions (decades before Mandelbrot discovered fractals). Holes in some of Duchamp's artwork link the 2nd to the 3rd dimension. Sometimes he shot the holes out with bullets, echoing infra-mince again in the delay between the sounds of the shot and the impact.

    via everything2.com

    Add this to the isovism concept and you basically describe a social network.

    Posted via web from ethank's posterous

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    A single isovist is the volume of space visible from a given point in space, together with a specification of the location of that point.

    via en.wikipedia.org

    Isovism is an interesting concept when applied to the creation of a website. Quantifying the perception of space in a given point. How far can you see from your homepage for instance into the larger n-dimensional world a site creates?

    Posted via web from ethank's posterous

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    The new iPad has lots of space. The screen offers 1024x768 pixels.

    via tuaw.com

    What excites me the most about the iPad, I think, is that it takes paradigms and approaches and lets us expand them. Good art, whether visual or interface, comes from working against constraints imposed by the medium. The iPhone imposed very strict constraints and amazing new paradigms of interface design came out of that. These new approaches have bled their way into Mac OSX apps, Windows 7, etc. I expect the same to happen with the iPad.

    Posted via web from ethank's posterous

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    The funny thing is, if Adobe does not take the steps to make tools to address a future with HTML5, what we'll be left with is tools others create. And chief amongst those others will most likely be Apple. Flash's stance here reminds of Microsoft's during the creation of Blackbird and later their migration toward Visual Interdev and Frontpage. When you build the walls so high around your garden, the fall will just kill your plants.

    [From Flash, iPad, Standards – Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report]

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    Rest in piece little buddy.

    [From xkcd - A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language - By Randall Munroe]

    - #

    Idiotic. Copy paste wasn't missing because of an ideological reason. It was missing because it wasn't ready. Same with an SDK and an App-Store. Multitasking presents a usability challenge that I wager they are nearly set in addressing. I bet the camera is supply chain related (same with the iPod Touch). WIth Apple products, what is MISSING is the interesting part, as it usually leads to exposure to ideologies, challenges or works in progress.

    [From What We Learned About Apple Yesterday]

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    I wonder if they are also seeing concurrent apps running from the same device, and that's how they know? I imagine the Tablet will be able to run multiple apps in a grid of some sort, given the screen size.

    [From Apple Tablet: The Second Stage Media Booster Rocket ]

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    A pretty big deal I think, especially considering the move from entertainment companies from "impression" based metrics to revenue.

    [From Boxee Blog » Coming soon: Boxee Payments]

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