Live Messenger 9 (BETA)

After having seen the modest UI and feature upgrades to today’s by far biggest IM service, the Microsoft Live Messenger (and formerly MSN Messenger), I speculated that maybe Microsoft had reached a level of dominance they felt comfortable with and didn’t want to alter such a successful product. This turned out to be wrong however. Live Messenger 9 is a (very big) step in the right direction.

The new, refreshed contact list

Microsoft has finally dropped the by now aged “Vista-like” theme and decided to rebuild the UI from the ground up. This gives the IM client a much refreshed and cleaner look, with easy-to-find menus and information.

Your contacts will de grouped up into two groups, avilable and Offline. The available list contains all contacts that are in the now (only) three status modes – Available, Busy and Away. Although Appear as offline is available as a fourth option.

At the very bottom, above the ad, is the new “What’s new” bar that constantly updates you on what is going on with your contacts. Who has altered his or her Picture / Personal Message / Nick / Live Space?

The normal chat window (Compare with below)

As a sidenote, also notice that when you’ve chosen to show what you are listening to as a personal message, this appears below the actual PM and does not replace it, like in earlier versions.

The chat window has went through the same type of change as the contact list window has. I like the new look a lot and it works perfectly. If you want to, you can hide the top buttons (Files, Video, Games, Call etc.) with just one click and the entire window will only contain your conversation. Easy and great.

The display pictures now support animated GIFs and a few comes with the beta. I have not noticed any problems with this, and adding your own animations is as simple as adding any other display pic.

There are still some bugs with trying to send people other-than-standard smileys, but this will no doubt be fixed as the product gets finished. As a nice touch on the contact page, hovering over a contact in the list brings up a half-transparent handy little menu with all the standard interaction methods.

Sending files can be issued by a simple drag-and-drop from a folder on to a contact.

Although the favourites are as standard showed with display pics, your other contacts are only displayed with a dot next to them (Green for available, yellow for away and red for busy). Also notice that this color code is shown around the display pics for the other contacts both in the list and in the chat window. Windows Live Messenger 9 supports multiple log-ins, which means that you can be logged in on more than one PC at the same time. Even though I don’t really see where this would be useful, I’m sure someone out there will figure out how.

Hovering over a contact brings up a nice menu.

WLM 9 also lets you use different sounds for different contacts, letting you know who has logged in by just listening.

This past year has shown Microsoft the invulnerabilities of the WLM platform. Viruses have infected computer after computer, sending spam and/or links to different sites (and those who click on them are then also infected). This has resulted in a new spamfilter for the platform, cleaning out and hopefully preventing these viruses from emerging in the future.

Overall, Microsoft has managed to add a few smaller feature changes to an already mature and very stable product. That, coupled with a great UI improvement, will bring most people to the download page as soon as Live Messenger 9 is finished

Marcus Näslund
tp640871@hotmail.com
2008-09-20