AOL releases AOL Helix, their newest integrated client.

Starting up AOL Helix, you can see the remnants of AOL’s clumsy past. Traces of their previous client, ”Open Ride” still lurk about. Things have changed however now that all the annoyances of Open Ride is gone. The “dynasizer” is no more, a feature which displayed 4 windows at the same time. The sluggishness of Open Ride’s long loading times are gone. Now we are left with a plain simple desktop. Similar to AOL 9.0, each window, whether it be aim, or e-mail, or a website, is completely draggable and can be maximized to full screen. Unlike 9.0, the welcome screen can now be closed without showing its annoying channel surfing sidebar. So it seems AOL has listened to its members and created something familiar yet different, although its still far from being totally original. The user interface reminds of the old days of MSN Explorer, except without its tabbed sidebar approach.

AppMap is AOL Helix answer to tabs, AppMap works similar to the way “Quick Tabs” work in Internet Explorer 7. Each Window, Webpage, and IM, is scattered across the screen. You can pick and choose which ever App you want to switch to. If you minimize any window, they are dropped to the bottom of the screen and shown as small thumbnails. This is far far more useful than AOL 9.0′s minimized window guessing game.

AOL Helix still has a few negatives going for it. One major disappointment is its large RAM requirements being 512MB, which is standard for most new computers bought today, but leaves the rest of AOL’s population out. The User Interface is pretty bland, and for some odd reason they are still using the same unimaginative blue gradients they used before in Open Ride. Hovering over a menu item displays a grey text on a blue background which is very hard to read. There is no Full Screen Mode, and by full screen we mean we should not be able to see the main toolbar at all. The IM window is not dockable, which for the most part could be the greatest addition to it. But the biggest annoyance is it uses that same aolsoftware.exe icon that cannot be closed. C’mon Its 2007 AOL! You can’t have Icons in the taskbar that don’t have a close button. You have to play this silly game of CTRL+ALT+DELETE just to stop all AOL processes from running.  

Currently the beta doesn’t have access to AOL’s internal keywords. So chatroom access is unavailable unless you go through Userplane and their deceptive banner ads that secretly installs downloader trojans. Yes, Userplane, looks like you’ll have to go through ALL your Ad clients and figure out who’s been dropping trojans inside.

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