I really wish iPhones had away messages for iMessage and/or SMS. It can seem like you're intentionally being a dick if you don't respond promptly, so it'd be nice to just make it clear you've chosen to be not available instead of this weird uncertain state that seems to be the default. Bonus points if you could join and leave group chats seamlessly like AIM chat rooms.
I don't think this is quite what you're looking for, but it's possible to set a custom auto-responding message when the phone is in do not disturb mode. I use this when I'm driving.
This is BS. The away message was invented by AOL "proggers" which included, amongst other features, the Away Message. This was long before AOL simply absorbed that feature. If you remember Fate/FateX, Sublime, Paladin, Magenta, and the other infinite number of tools many of them had this feature. AOL just copied it because like most awesome things, it was invented by the users' creativity. AOHell4LYFE. -~[1337 tewlz]…
Got my start writing proggies. Private channel vb/vb4 represent.
AIM was one of those unique things, it was 'cool' even though it was created by AOL. AOL was the lamest online service, it was what your grandma used. No self-respecting hacker or power user would use AOL. But everyone used AIM.
You must be young. The AOL hacker scene was quite vibrant. Mass mailers, PR room: server, server when server got banned, cerver. Plus the plethora of exploits. Go to archive.org and lookup aol-files.com. EDIT: lest I forget AIM pr: darkside
Yes, I spent a lot of time writing mass mailers, punters, laggers, and much later.. phishing and chat bots.
They don't get into it, but the AIM host infrastructure was based on the event-based non-blocking libraries written by Lippke. The host complex was a distributed hash table (routed on relevant data, e.g. Screen name, ICQ number), with the extra step that you can migrate the in-memory state from one host to another while still taking incoming work. Quite a powerful infrastructure to build highly-available services. On…
The early days of Facebook chat where god awful, with tons of missed messages and things not syncing within the web and 3rd party clients. AIM (and even Yahoo and MSN) were over a decade ahead of that garbage before FB eventually caught up with having a messaging system that didn't suck ass. In fact most things Facebook did originally it did poorly: poor quality photo storage (Flickr offered high quality or even orig…
All these systems stay proprietary, and then others can't build on top of their previous work. Seemingly any "science" which is designed to make money gets locked up in intellectual property or patents and the state of the art never progresses.
We have probably re-invented the exact same systems over the last 30 years, poorly, because companies are too bass-ackward to share their engineering work.
This is BS. The away message was invented by AOL "proggers" which included, amongst other features, the Away Message. This was long before AOL simply absorbed that feature. If you remember Fate/FateX, Sublime, Paladin, Magenta, and the other infinite number of tools many of them had this feature. AOL just copied it because like most awesome things, it was invented by the users' creativity. AOHell4LYFE. -~[1337 tewlz]…
Got my start writing proggies. Private channel vb/vb4 represent.
Before there were AOL CDs, there were AOL Floppy disks. There were gold to me. I had no money to buy floppies and I had stuff that I wanted to, uh, save. I think I still have an AOL Floppy in the original shrink-wrap somewhere.
14.4 Kbps modem...sneak downstairs after bed, hold pillows over computer to muffle the modem's screeching, set one (1!) picture to download over night, set alarm to wake up before everyone else, find connection died and only downloaded top third of the picture. Rinse and repeat until I finally had something worth, uh, saving on a floppy disk.
A fun (troll) use that I had for an AOL CD... I borrowed a CD from a friend in high school. It was their favorite CD, but we were friends so they lent it to me. When it was time to return the CD to my friend...I took an AOL CD, ground it into the dirt, held a lighter to one side, shattered it, and then scotch taped it back together. When I "returned" my friend's favorite CD, I gave them AOL CD shiny-side up. After a short (fewer than 5 second) freak-out, I returned my friend's favorite CD in pristine condition. I was a bit of a jerk, but they took it in good humor.
I grew up with AIM and remember, even before AIM, the AOL CDs stockpiled in my house. They were quite handy as coasters and lids to wine glasses in the summer when the fruit flies came out. My parents still have some lying around for those purposes, not at all the classiest solutions but free and better than the landfill? There isn't even a CD drive in that house anymore. More on topic, AIM as something to grow up wi…
lids to wine glasses in the summer when the fruit flies came out Are fruit flies not able to fly through the big hole in the middle of the CDROM?