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I plan to post about my month long frolic in Thailand soon enough – a month’s worth of photos take a while to sort through – but this seemed so incredibly strange that I had to blog it.

A couple days ago, AOL released AIM for Mac Beta 1 (henceforth called “AIM”), a completely rewritten version of AIM for Mac after letting the the original AIM for Mac languish for years.

I download AIM and was greeted with a package installer. Now, for an app like AIM, this is completely unnecessary. AOL: Just give me a disk image to open and copy the app out of. I’ve seen the negative press before from .pkg files; specifically, some vendors use them to install random files throughout your system even when they don’t have to. As a precaution, I investigate them now. Much to my surprise I saw the word “Talkback” in one of the files.

For those who don’t know, Talkback is the name of the crash reporting system Mozilla uses for applications based on the Gecko 1.8 branch (and before) including Camino 1.6.x, Firefox 2.0.0.x, and Thunderbird 2.0.0.x. It’s an old, fragile system – both the client and the server – acquired from the Netscape days. Talkback also happens to be a group of four systems I manage at Mozilla. When I said it’s fragile, I mean it. The server often falls over and we scramble to fix it. The client looks fairly ugly and doesn’t provide the features we need (such as compatibility on Intel Macs).

AOL couldn’t be using Talkback. Not that Talkback.

Of course, seeing Talkback anywhere forced me to install AIM and survey the damage.

AIM uses quite a bit of open source software. The quick list includes:

• MOKit
• Pantomime
• PSMTabBarControl
• NSPR
• NSS

The last two are likely familiar to Mozillians.

Overall, it’s a pretty happy list, though MOKit and Pantomime seem to be older, less maintained projects (side note: anyone know of a replacement for Pantomime?). But I’ll be darned if AIM doesn’t include Talkback, right alongside the open source software.

Talkback in AIM is different than Talkback in Mozilla apps. For one, AIM uses version 2.0b4, Mozilla uses version 2.0b1. For two, the size of the Talkback application in AIM is 888 KB to Mozilla’s 480 KB. That, of course, is likely a consequence of AIM’s Talkback being a Universal application. Someone has gone through the trouble of updating Talkback specifically for AIM. Why in the world they would do this, I have no idea. Especially when a better alternative exists.

AOL did an “okay” thing by updating AIM in spite of iChat being the de-facto AIM client on Mac. They just completely ruined it in the end by incorporating a crash reporting system that is clearly ready to break down any day now.

As I mentioned in my last post on the matter, we need to take Talkback down to remove a lot of data and start fresh. That will be happening tonight at 5pm PDT. We’re not sure how long it will take to remove the data and rebuild the tables, so expect to lose Talkback for at least a few hours, at most a day. If things go wrong, we’ll be reverting to the backup we made a couple weeks ago.

See you on the other side!

Here’s an interesting canvas demo site from the guy behind Blogoscoped.