Yahoo Again

   Finally I found the time to write this. I promised I'd write the Browsers article, but before I had the chance to do that something extraordinary happened. A few weeks ago I wrote an article, Yahoo Depression, and I was saying that Yahoo has yet to release the long awaited Vista Messenger, nor had they given any news on it's development. Well after reading my bad reviews about them Yahoo decided it was finally time to give us a preview of the product. So they launched the beta version of the program. You can download it here! I downloaded it as quickly as I heard, because I was really curious how it will look and what it can do. So here are the features:  (* Remember this is just a beta version so the full one will probably have more cool and interesting stuff)

   First of all the design. Yes, it really is great. The color schemes integrate very nice, and the whole program has that cool, stylish, Vista look to it.Plus the contacts now arange themselves according to your window size. One smiley face for Yahoo till now.

   Second, we have the big avatars, and the adjustable display mode for the friends list. That works out really nice, but unfortunately I have found some bugs and some things that could be improved. For example the program seems to randomly choose when to display a web adress as a link ..or just as a normal status. And if the status is really long there's no other way of seeing it than opening an IM window with the person and stretching it out as long as you need to. That's why I sent Yahoo a suggestion ( using the very nice Feedback link in the program) to simply maximize contacts in the list ,regardless of the display setting, whenever they are selected. That would really make things easy and smooth.

   Third feature, and this one is probably the nicest : Tabbed IMs. As it was said in the demo video ( yes that very old one that i was complaining about ) whenever you talk to multiple people you now need only one IM window. You have tabs, and choose from the different people you are talking to. As i said this is a very nice feature ( and just in case you don't like you can always expand the windows) because it helps keep your desktop clean.

   Another feature, you can actually take one or more contacts and post them on your Vista Sidebar so you can monitor them directly without having to check the Yahoo window everytime.Now I don't use this ( because for some reason it doesn't work), but it's still a nice feature.

   The last added nice thing that I want to mention is they increased the transferable file size even more. It now reaches 2gb of data. This is actually great as I send lots of edited clips that can take up a lot of space, and thus this helps a lot.

   Now as this is still a beta version I'm not sure what right I have to complain about this but I will do it anyway. Certain , very nice features, seem to have disappeared, such as Photo Share. That is completely gone and there's no mention of it anywhere. Also voice chat, audibles and some other stuff are also gone. I hope , and I believe that these features will be back in the full version, which will probably be released some time in Q2 of 2008.
   Oh and as a last bug thingy : I noticed the memory usage of the program fluctuates a lot sometimes as low as 2mb and sometimes as much as 200 mb. Still haven't figured out why it's doing that and if this only happens to me or to everybody. Well besides this, the program is very nice overall and I do recommend it, at least for a go.I'll let you discover new features on your own.
Have fun with it!