17.4.05

Beware of MSN Messenger 7

As some of you may alredy know MSN Messenger 7 has been released, and people have alredy been adviced there is a new version of Messenger to download.

Beta versions of MSN Messenger 7 were quite frankly distateful, at least for me, but this new version I should say it's pretty neat. In fact it has so many new neat features that it makes me shiver.

Let's start with my favourite, second nick, or personal message. Believe it or not I already had thought of it, so I think it's a great idea. I would like to have to option to switch it off so those longly insane nicks doesn't bother me again.

But aside of the personal message you can thins "song I'm currently listening" option. It's displayed as a different thing UI-side. Of course, it will only work right on with WMP, but you can download a plug-in for Winamp and you can personalize it so you can display your rating of the song and a lot of crazy stuff. I love this one, I can't wait to implement it in Gaim.

MSN Messenger is now connected with MSN Spaces. I didn't know of that service but that's what scaries me the most. It's very integrated, you have a Blog, photos, music list, bookmarks, storage, friends list. And all that stuff connected with MSN Messenger and WMP. So you can import the best rated songs in your WMP library to your MSN Space, you can have your photos in your personal card in MSN Messenger, and you can even see the first part of your last blog entry there too.

You also have winks, which can be stupid for most of people, but it can entertain you a little bit once and then.

You have bigger emoticons. And you can just right-click and add them, no need to ask for them.

Support to write Ink messages.

Nudge, like Yahoo's buzz.

Those are the main things I can remember right now, plus a different UI.

So for end-users it's simply very neat. But for us, IM developers, writers of alternative clients, we have a new thing to worry about, and something to get our hands dirty with.

I guess we don't have a lot of time before we will start getting feature requests of this stuff in #gaim.

/me sighs

3 comments:

Erik said...

Did you start working on the personal message stuff? ;)

Unknown said...

Somebody else did.

I tried his patch and it seems to be working fine. However it requires the use of a new version of the MSN protocol. The code for this new version seems to be working fine... but it stills needs to be more tested.

Anonymous said...

So where can i reach the person working on this patch? i ask because i know someone who was working on a patch to this, and he cant work on it anymore.