It's not that hard to do - 99.9% of all AIM traffic is sent in plaintext with an annoying little bit of junk at the beginning. This makes formatting it for viewing easier than one could ever imagine. The hardest part was making it reliable, stable (I did get a ton of bluescreens thanks to the unstable packet capture driver), and able to decode all messages. Even with the last version I worked on 1/4th of all messages were hacked up or scrambled. I think most were file transfer initiations (which I was just ignoring the existence of for laziness purposes) or Unicode (which is a pain in the ass).

The later versions I wrote were able to 'discover' local AIM users and resolve their names. This is the biggest problem with the whole deal - the only time the local AIM user name is ever sent over the network is during the initial login; that means that the app has to be running when they sign on or else you just know their IP. By leaving it running for a few nights I was able to resolve a majority of the network nodes with no problem.

The biggest flaw with the app was the horrible storage mechanism. For ease of coding (read: more laziness) I just had an Access DB backend which was loaded when the app started and flushed when the app exited. This meant a crash would lose all the session data and starting/stopping took about 5 minutes. With only a week left before going home for the summer I didn't want to waste 3 days writing a nice caching algorithm and SQL backend ;)

Please don't ask for this, as I won't give it to you. Not only because I don't believe in doing something devious with someone else's deviousness, but because this thing is horribly unstable. Bluescreens, random crashes, loss of network, and other such headaches are way too frequent.

Some of the biggest problems with v1 that will be fixed:

• Lack of foresight in the resolver - a single IP may have multiple AIM users (duh)
• Horrible UI - the most important part of the app
• Abysmal storage system - improved Access and new SQL backend (?)
• AIM only - planned extensions for MSN, ICQ (kinda AIM), Yahoo (?), Jabber, and maybe others
• Lack of flexibility - easy plug-in architecture is needed
• High rate of error - more testing and hacks will hopefully allow all messages to be decoded
• Missing neat thingies - things like a URL grabber, buddy icon decoder, and others would be fun

As you can see, I have my work cut out for me. I would like, to start on the new version in hopes of having a base completed by the time fall semester starts. Think I can do it?...

This project has been halted.