Friday, March 16, 2007

IMified


imifiedI hadn't really previously played around with IMified, but decided to give it a spin today.  The ides of IMified is that you can interact with web-based programs through your IM client, allowing you to not have to open other applications, web browser windows, etc. in order to populate and receive information.



To start off with, I added "IMified" to iChat as an AIM contact and . . . nothing happened.  Even though the main IMified page showed that their AIM client was online, it wasn't showing up as online, so I deleted the contact, tried it again, and then just gave up.



A few hours later, I noticed the IMified logo in my buddy list, so I sent an IM to the client.  One of the disconcerting things about IMified is that there is no account setup page on the main IMified page -- you need to send an IM to the IMified contact in order to get to the setup process.  As soon as I sent an IM to the IMified client, I received an immediate reply back with the Main Menu.  Typing back the number "4" got my some URLs for configuring my account, so I clicked the "Account Settings" URL and . . . got a note that said that I was not on IMified's buddy list and that I needed to delete the IMified entry in iChat, add the entry again, and refresh the page.



Slightly frustrated and feeling stupid, I noticed that the IMified icon was again not available in iChat.  I did add the IMified GooglTalk address through Gmail, which worked fine, but IMified still did not show that I had been added to their buddy list -- I assume this has something to do with not using the standalone Google Talk client.  In any event, I added IMified one more time in iChat, and this time it stuck, so I was able to edit my account settings.



The first service I wanted to add was a Blogger service that would allow me to do quick blog posts from iChat.  Unfortunately, IMified does not support the new Blogger API, so I was unable to post.  Endeavoring to get IMified to work for something, I added the Google Calendar and Backpack services -- both of these services worked great, and I'll probably use them extensively to quickly add calendar items and to-do items.



Sure, IMified is a little buggy, but they're very upfront that it's a free service and that they are learning along with everyone.  Although I haven't had a chance to test it, I'm very anxious to see how productive IMified will be on my mobile phone.



Link 


No comments: