Besides buying laptops, installing Windows and remaking the blog template there hasn't been too much going on. But the highlights are that we finally have a date for Windows Seven Release Candidate 1 and that is: 30th April for MSDN and TechNet and May 5th for everybody else.
For all you haters, ignorants or just unsure and concerned people out there that believe Win 7 will be crap and you're still in love with your XP and your apps the people at MS actually did something useful :Windows XP Mode and Windows Virtual PC.
It's a mod for win seven that will allow you to install XP apps via Virtual PC and then run them in Seven. Check the link for more info.
Oh and on the lighter side of things the Yahoo Mess team did a little tinkering around and now you profile can show your updates from multiple social sites such as Last.fm and YouTube and Tweeter directly in YMess. Check out this post for more info.
As some of you may know Yahoo announced a few days ago they would be launching a new app for the iPhone, the Messenger app. Well today was that day and the app is out. You can find it on the AppStore, but right now it's only available on the US Store. So I decided to check it out.
The first thing you must remember is that YAHOO! is NOT THE SAME THING as YAHOO! MESSENGER. I had no idea there were two apps flying around, both official yahoo stuff. The first one "Yahoo!" would actually be cute if it wasn't utter crap. It's an app designed to give you all your yahoo stuff, such as e-mails, news, messenger, flickr, etc all in one app. The idea is nice, the design is actually very nice but the implementation is very bad. The app is slow, refreshes all the time and I actually made it crash twice by pressing two buttons on the screen at the same time. You don't get any notifications on new messages and well ..it's simply useless. The only thing it would be good at ( in my opinion) is for reading the news but of course you can do that via Safari or any of other 1000 news related apps.
The second app, and the one I was originally looking for is Yahoo!Messenger. Their icons are the same except the Messenger one has a yellow smiley on it. Well this app is great. Though a friend of mine complained it was sluggish, I didn't experience any problems with it. The design is great, simple and direct, you can change your status, you can even host a link, you can send pictures ( tried it and it worked great) either from your library or by taking a pic right there. Aaaa it still has a few more features but I don't remember them right now. Anyway it really is excellent, supersedes Palringo and OneConnect and especially Fring.
If you want a full list of features, and some more info you can visit the Y! Messenger Blog. Oh and I also embedded the presentation video for the app. Cheers
This is actually news from 2 weeks ago but I thought of posting it just in case you haven't found out yet: Yahoo cancelled the developement of the Vista version of Messenger. After 1 year and a half they finally caved and no further work will be put in this project. For those of you that have the Vista edition installed, don't worry it will still work but no new features are going to be added, and there's no online support for it. For the rest of you don't worry, Mess 9.0 works very well and we even got the old smileys back. And for those of you who completely missed the whole Mess for Vista thing you can check out this post. CHeers!
As you can see I added ( yes there on the right column) a Yahoo PingBox™. You can send me an IM whenever I'm online ( supposedly) and for other info and features check out this link. I did this to test the app and also cause it might actually be really cool.
I'll also add ( today/tomorrow/whenever) a search thingy so you can find what you need faster.
I forgot to post this but 2 days ago Yahoo Messenger 9.0 finally came out, no longer just a beta. It features everything 8.1 did ( we even came back to the original smileys) , and supposedly there are no more bugs. Also the guys from Yahoo added an interesting new feature called Pingbox. It's an app that can be embedded into your blog/site/thingy and through which people can send direct IMs to you anonymously, but without knowing your ID. Nothing really extra added as far as I've seen except a few more color skins.
If you're new to Y Messenger 9.0 and would like a complete overview you can find it here!
I am really not in the mood to write anything right now, so I'll keep this really short. Yahoo came out a few days ago with a new version of Messenger designed for the iPhone. Unfortunately it only works in the US right now, and I think you might get taxed for some services but I can't be sure cause I couldn't find a way to test it on my iPhone even after downloading it from the US App. Store. The app itself has a nice UI , it uses the SMS service for messages ( at least that's the way I saw it) and has a few other features. You can check out an overview of it right HERE! ( For some reason I can't link to this site so you just copy paste this in your browser : http://www.ymessengerblog.com/blog/2008/09/10/oneconnect-yahoo-messenger-for-the-iphone-and-a-whole-lot-more/ )
For the rest of you who are not living in the US/ who don't want to get taxed for extra services , I recommend Palringo, which is a very nice, easy to use and ergonomic app that you can download for free at any Apple app store. Nor does it have any hidden charges, and it works with Y mess, MSN, Palringo service, and a few other widespread social networks.
I was looking around on the Yahoo Messenger blog and came across something that I found was really fun. Nothing related to business, but you should still check out THIS LINK. A few days ago Matt Harding went and danced around with the Yahoos in Sunnyvale mostly and they all had a lot of fun. Have a look.
Well in the absence of any other article I'll just fill you in on a few things that caught my attention lately.
First of all on the Microsoft - Yahoo deal.
As you all know a few days ago Microsoft put up an unsolicited bid of 44 billion $ for Yahoo. They tried to do this one or two years ago and they got a very big NO. The answer was exactly the same this time, not to mention all the oposition towards the merger from outside parties. Without any other bid, MS may still argue that their price is fair, and will probably try to put pressure on Yahoo executives into negotiating, even if that will eventually mean reaching a higher strike point than iniatially thought. Yahoo's response to the unsolicited bid was to apparently restart negotions for a merger between them and AOL. This was quoted from London-based Times newspaper which also mentioned Google as another possible partner for future colaboration with Yahoo. Right now most of us will just have to wait to see how this whole thing turns out.
Second thing in the news: Vista Service Pack 1. It's done, it's ready but you're not going to get it any time soon. At least that was the way Mike Nash from MS first explained it to us. Vista SP1 was released to manufacturing on the 4th of February but a full implementation of it was scheduled for mid April. The reasons for this were quite confusing and weird... Microsoft- style. First Mike said that there were still some issues with certain drivers that would malfunction once the update to SP1 was complete. And so there was this 1st thing to solve. Then they said that the whole point was a great Vista experience and that everyone should receive the sp at the same time, and because mid April is when it will be in stores that was the release date on Windows Update too. And now , I believe MS must have reconsidered after the negative response because the SP1 is already available on both MSDN and TechNet for subscribers to download. And almost all the prerequisites for the sp were put up on Windows Update in preparation for the release which was set for mid-March. So in just 3 weeks most of us will have it installed. Now for exact info on what the sp will bring you can check around on microsoft.com. Be sure I'll do an article about this when the time comes.
Well that was is , time's up. Stay tuned the next article is due soon. Cheers, Geeky.
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!
Not only am I depressed because of my own day to day life, but now Yahoo decided to depress me even further. Ever since I got Vista, I was anxious about the new Yahoo Messenger for Vista, of which I saw a presentation here. Useless to say that almost one year later that page hasn't changed a bit, and there is absolutely no news of the new program. I'm very satisfied with the 8.1 Messenger at the moment, but the new one would have improved the whole Vista experience thing even more. I mean come on, we all want cool smart looking stuff on our pcs. Not only is the project long overdue but it now seems to be dead and burried as Yahoo stopped it's developement and moved on to the new Yahoo Messenger 9.0 Beta Release.
I must say that at first when I heard about this I was actually happy. I said well they must have taken their ideas from the Vista one, integrated them with this one and so the new thing must be absolutely great. Unfortunately I was waaay to idealistic for Yahoo's standards.
Ok I don't want to be that mean, so I'll start with their ( one and only ) nice new feature: the "inline media player". The media player is integrated into the IM window so from now on whenever someone gives you a link to let's say YouTube you can view the movie directly in your window without having to open a separate browser. I understand the same happens for JPEG, GIF and PNG images. Yes truly a nice new feature, BUT i can already see problems with it. If you're anything like me, you'll have lots of people sending you lots of different video links, occasionally at the same time. From what I saw, even if it doesn't directly play the video it still loads the player for every link in every window. Now you get to fill up your RAM with only a few links. So where the hell did all my multitasking power go ?
Enough with being nice. I've waited a really long time for a new Messenger ( 1 year , Yahoo Messenger 8.1 came out in Q4 of 2006) and they really disappointed me. Let's start with the beginning. Yahoo Messenger 9 offers a cool new user interface ..NOT. It's exactly the same interface just that they moved the avatars on the right side and made them somewhat bigger. Great now we can all perfectly see the "Yahoo Sucks MSNRulz " pictures better. Another thing they added is the hover options. If you hover your mouse on a contact some action buttons will appear such as IM , E-mail and Call. Perfectly useless as we already had those action buttons in 8.1 next to the pop up thing remember ? Talking about useless, the new Messenger automatically creates a new group for you with all your address book contacts so you can now scroll 80 pages down if you want to look around in your contacts. Again Mess 8.1 had this done in a much more subtle and nice way: the icons under your status that changed between Address Book and Messenger List. As the guy in the demo says ( you can watch the demo here) a nice new feature of Yahoo Messenger 9.0 is the Search bar up there in which you can write a contact's name/id and it will find it for you. Now maybe it's just me but wasn't this feature already included in the program ? Oh yes ..wait ..I can see it now as I minimize Opera and look directly at my main messenger window... I wonder how it got in 8.1 if it's brand new in 9.0 ? And now for the realNEW AND AWESOME FEATURE : Whenever you write a " :) " in your status message, it now actually appears as ..as ...as ... A YELLOW SMILEY!!!! Indeed ladies and gentlemen a feat never before seen in any messaging program. You have to hand it to the guys at Yahoo , they really know what counts.
As an ending, I'll just recommend we all use Meebo.com for messaging. At least they never pretend to be better than they really are.
I take apart, reasemble, install, uninstall, hack and slash, try and try again with stuff related to PCs and Macs. You can get in touch with me by sending me an e-mail at: woodyelf1@yahoo.com or even better just leave a comment.
