Yahoo is opening up their 8.0 release of Yahoo Messenger to developers. The Messenger SDK can be downloaded here and Michael Arrington has more on TechCrunch.
Messenger can now be extended in two ways. You can pro grammatically add:
* “Content Tab” plug-ins–think in terms of Sidebar Gadgets for the Messenger client
* “Conversation” plug-ins that appear in a tiled fashion to the side main chat window–think in terms of a shared space during a chat session.
The screenshot above shows the Yahoo Scribbler plug-in in use. You can get to it by starting a chat session in Yahoo Messenger and then clicking on the “Plug-ins” button which will then pop open the Conversation Window for the plug-ins. In this window extension you can pick from a variety of stock plug-ins, Scribbler being one of them. Once you click on the Scribbler plug-in a request will be made to the user on the other end of the chat and if they accept it, the Scribbler session will begin. If the user accepts the plug-in request, then the plug-in will become active for each user.
Scribbler provides some simple drawing tools and support for pulling images from Flickr and the like. However, if you’re a Tablet owner like myself, you probably will be underwhelmed. The quality of the ink does not match that which the Tablet can render. Not even close. Two high-school students aren’t going to be able to work through a math problem in Scribbler, for instance. The ink can’t keep up with the speed of the pen nor is the quality good enough. And, as you might have already guessed, there’s no copy/paste.
So you guessed it, it didn’t take me much time before I started thinking about creating a Yahoo Messenger plug-in for Tablet PCs quality ink. Nope, I don’t have it done yet (Heh), but there is some good news. It turns out that the plug-ins are hosted in Internet Explorer within the conversation window which means that we can use an ActiveX control to provide a Tablet-quality whiteboard in Yahoo Messenger.
Last night I only got as far as reading through the documentation and downloading the SDK (which doesn’t have much in terms of samples) so all of this is in theory only. I’m not sure if there will be any gotchas, but this may not be too hard. It seems that we now have one more use for the browser-based ink support I’ve been working on. My fingers are crossed that this will work.
Hi, I’m glad to see that you took a look at scribbler. I’m sorry that it didn’t meet with your approval, but I assure you that this is a work in porgress.
A co-worker and I built this in our spare time as a side project. I built the “doodle IMV” about four years ago, and wanted to re-create it using some of the new features in Flash 8. Honestly, I wasn’t even thinking about tablet PCs as a use case for the panel, but not that you mention it, it is a very good point.
There is an optimization going on to reduce the number of points that have to be shared, but looking at your screenshot, you aren’t even getting close to that. I’m not sure what is causing the low sample rate. I have noticed that different input devices will trigger the mouseMove event in Flash at different rates.
If you have some time, send me an email and we can chat on IM. I would be interested in hearing more of your feedback and running some tests.