Windows Live Messenger

Well, once upon a time ago I promised you regular update on WLM 8.0 Beta…

At the moment, my biggest issue with it is latency.. I send a message, and sometimes a person gets it immediately, sometimes half an hour later, and sometimes it comes back as undeliverable, although I had sent a line of text two seconds earlier that I had received on my other PC immediately..

I have yet to figure out sharing folders work, though as I am on 5270 part of the workaround is to disable sharing folders; but I could never get MSN WLM to inform the other party that I am attempting to share something, and when I tell them myself, they cannot open the shared folder on my computer… So much for that..

Nudges don’t make sound on Vista either.. But I realize that WLM is not made to be run on Vista… Not yet, at any rate… So I’ll try to focus on XP.

I’m a critical kind of guy. My sharp criticism comes cheap, and my praise comes rarely.. I’m a pessimest, and that’s life. You may disagree, after all, I’m constantly praising Vista; but that is something else. There is much I criticize about the Vista Project, but that as far as where everything should go down to the nitty-gritty details. I approve of the direction that Vista is taken compared to XP however.

That said, WLM is at the very least a very easy to use program. From the start, it seems to be tailored to be ‘dummy-proof.’ The same way that the move from BASIC to Object-Oriented Programming meant users dictated what happened next; I think WLM is the same from MSN 7.5

For example, by right-clicking on your Avatar you can change it. By clicking on your Personal Message you can modify that too. Everything is where you expect it to be; so as far as aesthetics go, its quite a nice bit of progress.. Beyond that WLM now has the ‘too simple and smoothed-over’ of Yahoo! Messenger. AIM was just plain ugly and useless, Yahoo! Instant Messenger looked, felt, and was, too bloated; while MSN Messenger had many of the Yahoo! features hidden beneath the surface. I am sure that many appreciate the move from the slightly harder to use MSN interface, but I personally rather some things to require a bit of know-how; for one thing it makes for a less cluttered design, and at the same time I can do my bit of showing off at parties :P

What I would like to see in WLM though is an ability to remove some (or all) of the tabs on the side!!

I’m not interested in Internet Radio, Dating, Holiday Shopping on MSN, or XBOX Live. But I do like the eBay tab, and the news and alerts is acceptable…

How about custom-made tabs? Maybe we can export RSS or ATOM feeds, add a background of our choice, give the bullets colors/images and give the tag a name and an icon…. Then you can get my Rambles on your MSN, and I can get my hacker-alerts on my MSN :D.

What would you like to see in WLM? Share your thoughts!

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  • 4 thoughts on “Windows Live Messenger

    1. One thing I would like a lot is the ability to see only those people who are online when I right click and select ‘Send an instant message’. Msn 7.5 had it and it was convinient to see if the person you are waiting for has arrived or not. Search in WLM is fine, but being shown all the offline people all the time is annoying IMHO 🙂

    2. You’re not the only one 🙂

      I don’t think it is possible because I can’t see anything on Google or MSDN referring to such a feature – we did suggest it as a feature to Microsoft a while back (during the beta) but it was rejected.

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