Big-O Software

Being able to see where your friends are on the net and find out what music they're listening to at any given time would add a sense of community to the program. Naturally you would want to be able to turn this feature on and off, but it could be nice.

you're nuts, they cannot possibly do this. They are programmers, not GOD!

yea... what about show it in your profile what music is currently playing on your winamp!??!?!

for example:

[currently listening to: darude - sandstorm.mp3]
[jamming: jimmy eat world - sweetness.mp3]
[playing: limp bizkit - n2togther now remix.mp3]

=]

It's quite an interesting idea. You see people chatting it up in IRC channels constantly quoting what mp3 they're listening to, so this isn't exactly an uncommon thought. Whether or not it's possible, I have no clue :).

soooooo this is a must have feature!!!!!

this would be relatively simple, in my opinion. assuming this is made in visual basic, you'd have to use some APIs to go through the windows and search for one titled "Winamp - xxx.mp3" and then append it as the last line in the html file the current profile is stored in. as for browsing, that might be harder to get the specific url, but the title would be simple, search for what ends in - microsoft internet explorer or - netscape or - opera, etc. i did make a program that would search for these things in visual basic 2 years or so ago, and am sure that it could be easily modified, so i believe i lost the source, but might be of some help if you'd want to do it this way. also, it should be noted, that looping through and finding the windows could be cpu intensive, so it'd be best to do it every 30 seconds or minute. also DoEvents, would be a good function to place in the window searching loop so that it stays as idle as possible, as this isn't a feature that should take any presedence over another feature.
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joshbrown40@hotmail.com

Please make this fantasy into a reality...

I found a Winamp plugin that writes song info into a text file (the song info written is whatever is displayed in the playlist). However, you can customize the settings of the plugin to insert whatever you want in addition to the song info and change the extension of the file from txt to htm. So now you have an htm file that could be used as your profile. The only problem is that AIM does not like it when you only replace the info.htm file without using the "update profile" feature in AIM. So the way I worked around that is saving the htm file to an internal webserver and putting a link in my AIM profile to load the htm file from my webserver into the profile window (kinda like how subprofiles work). I don't know if there is any other workaround, but this is the way I've been doing it for a few weeks now and it works great.

-Tom

We're pretty excited about this too, hopefully it will find its way into a future version of AIM+ :).

Pragmatically, this could be done, as someone state above. But I think it's a totally bad idea; total lack of privacy. If I want someone to know what I’m listening to, I’ll tell them. Even scarier is them seeing where you're surfing, I know I wouldn't like that either. The idea of someone else, even “buddies” to be able to see what I’m doing isn’t something I’d like in my chat client. And I don’t’ think I’m just being overly paranoid., it just doesn’t seem right. Also, then AIM+ goes beyond the scope of being a chat client (actually, an add-on to a chat client) and it becomes something more reminiscent of spy-ware.
Overall, don't think it's a good idea (if it ever does become real, I would at least hope these options are OFF by default)

I feel that I can speak for Ryan in this, when I say that we value our programs as having as many "options" as possible.

If you look at the preferences screens for any of the programs, we put almost all the features that are available in there, so they can be turned on/off at will. I'm positive that if this feature makes it into a future release, that it will be totally optional for each user to show what they are listening to, etc.

I know that I personally would rather not let anyone that I'm talking to know what I'm listening to in Winamp at any point they feel.

Dan's right, of course, everything should be optional, to whatever degree is reasonably possible.

But I think the winamp feature would be fun. I think it'd be amusing to let anybody know what I'm listening to, and to see what they're playing. I think it'd be cool.. well, that's all I'll say about it for now

As for the browser, feature would anyone want that? Of course it'd be fascinating to know what somebody else is looking at, but would you want them to know what you're looking at?

Not to knock the suggestion, both were good.. ideas are neat, bring 'em on, debate them, etc ..[/i]

Ryan, the only reason the browser thing scares you is that the world would finally know that you have an insatiable appetite for hardcore porn.

Seriously though, I like the Winamp idea a lot. The browser idea is intriguing; but I think it's one I'd turn off.

Mark, don't you mean hardcore barnyard pr0n?

Well, crap. The cat's out of the bag now; I suppose I might as well just add the feature.