AVChat Software Product Blog

It’s been a while since the last time we talked about the IM, but we’ve not stopped working on it. We’ve previously made a silent launch (as in: there was no mention f it on our blog) of the new management area (Update 6) and today we’re announcing and launching a host of new changes (Update 7).

The new management area (completely replaced)

We’ve completely replaced the old and dusty IM management area with a new one.

Here’s what’s new in this one:

• Completely new easy to use design
• Dashboard for each website for quick access to the most important information including IM news from this blog
• Settings area with 9 options for fine tuning your IM installation
• Statistics area with a nice line chart that shows you the number of messages sent over the last 30 days (3 more charts are under development)
• Themes area from where you can choose the theme for your IM
• Install area with easy to access plugins for 3rd party CMS systems and embed codes to add the IM to your website

You can login your new IM management area from the AVChat IM website: http://avchat.im/m/clients/ .

Here are a few screenshots to get you excited:

Dashboard

IM Settings

Themes Selection

IM Usage Charts

Changes to the  conversation tab (better and faster)

The conversations tab has suffered a rather drastic overhaul.

• We’re now keeping the clickable area at the bottom so you don;t have to move the mouse when you want to close it after opening it
• We’ve reorganized the information in it on 2 lines instead of 3 for better scanning and reading:
  

  New conversations tab has the information organized on 2 lines

• The focus is now on the last message from the user instead of the user itself
• We’ve also added a cool loading graphic, that shows up while the conversations are loaded:

The new conversations tab now shows a small loading animation

Changes to the embeddable area (separation of functions)

Until now the [send message] button had 2 functions:

1. initiate IM window
2. show status of member (online, offline, idle)

These functions have now been separated and are shown separately:

New embeddable area separates the status information from the [send mesage

In the future we will also separate the embed codes for each element (chat button, status, reply rate and quick message) so that you can put the reply rate under profile pictures and th [send message] button in search results.

Themes support (2 themes, more to come)

Yes, we’ve added themes support today. You can choose between 2 themes at this moment:

• the default grey+green one
• a new blue theme that fits very well with the default Social Engine 4 theme:
  

  Blue theme for Social Engine 4 web sites

You can choose the theme from the new IM management area.

New themes will be added in the future, we might even throw in an Easter or Christmas theme or two!

Much improved IM caching mechanism (faster than ever)

The IM uses quite a bit of java script files, icons and graphics, this means your member’s browsers need to load all of them.

We’ve taken a deep look at how these files are loaded and cached by the browser and server and we’ve made changes to improve the loading times. And they have improved considerably, the conversations tab now shows up almost instantly

All files are now cached by the browser and instead of asking the server if there were any changes the browser just loads them from it’s memory.

This is not the be all and end all of fast IM’s, we still have a few good speed-improoving ideas we want to implement in future builds.

That’s it for now. We’ll continue to improove the IM as long as you keep the feedback comming so please email us at contact@avchathq.com with your thoughts or comment below.

Update: you can discuss the changes in the dedicated forum thread: http://avchathq.com/forum/index.php?/topic/1437-avchat-im-updates-5-and-6-bring-new-management-area-faster-im-and-themes/ .

Tags: avchat im

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 10th, 2012 at 16:40 and is filed under AVChat IM (http://avchat.im), Builds. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.