March 12
New Live Messenger
Logging into Live Messenger today I was greeted with a message informing me that a new version of Live Messenger is available. Without hesitation I clicked the download link and waited for the download to finish. I unchecked all the unnecessary addons like the gallery feature, mail, ect. All I want to do is talk with a handful of people online. That's it. Even so it clocked in at 68 MB or so.
Once finished it signed me into Messenger. I instantly noticed that the "signing-in icon" spun a bit faster, but it really didn't seem to log me in any faster. After waiting a few seconds I was finally signed in and saw the new Live Messenger:
So this is it. Nothing drastically different from previous builds. The "Favorites" feature made me laugh though. Its as if we're "rating" our contacts. Those not under the Favorites section are meaningless peons worth less than a grain of salt. Okay, maybe not. But it's still a bit comical. I just threw in 3 people I talk to on a semi-regular basis to show off the feature. Next we have themes:
Overall these themes are quite pointless, but most themes are so who cares. I like how we can import our own themes from our hard drive, though most of them look like crap since MS decided to add drop-shadows to your display name and note. I've decided to stick with the default blue because of this. My main gripe about this latest version of Live Messenger(so far) is the chat window:
The thing I noticed right off the bat is the placement of the display pictures. For some reason they decide flip them over to the other side. I'm not exactly sure why they did this, because there seems to be no reason at all for them to change sides. There's no gain in having them on the left hand side that I know of. But this isn't what bothered me. Take a look at the right hand side of the chat window. See how it just suddenly cuts off? And no, I didn't do that in Photoshop. I've included a bit of background to prove this. This only happens when you have an image set as the background, which I rarely ever do, but it's still something they should fix. Adding a border around the chat box really can't be that hard to do.
I do like how it compacts multiple IM's right under one another, instead of displaying them as separate messages. And they've FINALLY added the ability to send someone a message even if they're offline. One final bug I have quite figured out yet is changing the chat box theme. No matter what I set my Messenger theme as, the chat box is always blue. I'll have to fiddle around I guess. I'm sure there are other, smaller features that I've yet to notice. But as of now, the latest version of Live Messenger is nice, but nothing special.
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