In the end, 6 months were necessary to create this update… 6 months! Looking back, I can’t believe time has passed so fast. This all started out like a standard minor update, destined to be labeled 4.30. I was working on it while most of you were clicking on the 6th Anniversary Contest grid. Then, an idea came up about improving the looks of the Plus! windows, followed by an urge to change everything, and when I finally decided to complete the skinning engine I had started 2 years ago, I knew the update would require more than another week to complete.

Here we are now, in December, 2 weeks away from Christmas, and the update has finally been uploaded to the servers! Not only that but the web site got a serious make-over as well. Everything looks nicer, everything works better; it is now up to you to decide whether or not all these changes were worth the efforts. Once again, I have to thank all the testers, all the translators, the graphic designers and the people in charge of the servers. They are all valuable members of the community, their help is precious and without them, Plus! wouldn’t be the software you know today.

As discussed in previous news posts, the main highlight of this update is skinning. You can now change the appearance of your Messenger, rapidly and securely. All the pictures can be modified, the windows re-shaped and the elements re-colorized… sky is the limit! Some of the testers did a lot of work in the past few weeks to showcase their talents and demonstrate how to work with the system. The resulting skins can be downloaded from the official Skins Database, a new section of msgpluslive.net. Note that some of these skins are not considered “final” (polished enough) by their creators yet but they’re worth downloading nonetheless.

If you’re interested in creating your own Messenger skin, check out the documentation included with Messenger Plus!, visit the help forum, take a look at the current skins to see how they were created and submit your creation when it’s ready to shine! More than 10 million scripts have been downloaded from the Scripts Database since last year already and skins promise to be as popular if not more. Remember that the success of this feature will mostly depend on your submissions so if you feel inspired, possess some basic technical knowledge and got some time ahead of you, don’t be shy and give the system a try! One last thing: in case you’d be wondering, yes, a skinning contest will indeed be organised early next year and every existing skin will be eligible :-).

Of course, skinning is only one of the many new things offered by this version. The Preferences panel has been re-designed with many new options added all over the place, Script developers can now enjoy new API functions as well as a much better built-in editor with support for IntelliSense and outlining, the Log Viewer has been completely reworked with features like “search in files” and “maximize view”, the Contact List Clean-Up now offers a “show contacts who have me in their list” mode, Contact Information windows give more information about your contacts, new event notifications are conveniently shown in the notification area of your chat windows, the uninstaller includes a Repair mode and is UAC friendly, etc… The sheer size of the Change Log alone should be enough to convince you that this is not a simple refresh of version 4.23.

Note: the software is still available in more than 20 languages, however, translation of the new web site’s pages will take another week or two to be completed. The web site itself is to be considered work-in-progress for some days. Translating from one language to another is a hard and time consuming job. All the translation teams did a tremendous job on the software already, I didn’t feel I could ask more from them before the software was released and people could enjoy the result of the efforts. The good news is that even more pages than before will be translated once the work is done.

That’s it for today. I hope you’ll all be pleased with the update. 22 million of you are now using Messenger Plus!. To me, that’s 22 million reasons to keep on working on it :-).

Enjoy!

It looks like I need some vacations. The previous versions of Messenger Plus! Live had a bug that caused the contest icon in the contact list to vanish after June 5th. To fix this problem, you’ll need to install the new Messenger Plus! Live version 4.23, now available in the download section. Sorry for the inconvenience (to make up for this, I’ll make sure that the contest is prolonged a little more :-).

A new version of Messenger Plus! is already available! the reason? check out mess.be… following the leak of an internal private beta version of Windows Live Messenger 8.5, the Messenger team decided to release a public beta of their new baby. As I didn’t want to force you to choose between testing a new Messenger and trying to win one of the great prizes of the 6th anniversary contest, I spent the last 2 days working on some quick fixes for the beta.

Messenger Plus! Live 4.22 adds support for Messenger 8.5.0517 and that’s about it; some bugs were fixed too but not that many. In any case, there’s no reason not to download this latest release so except if you’re short on bandwidth for the month, you should update as soon as you can :-).

That’s it for today. Stay tuned for tomorrow’s announcement of this week’s contest winners as well as other stuff concerning the contest!

These days, it seems like not much is going on around Messenger. Many MSN/Windows Live Messenger dedicated web sites spend half of their times talking about other Windows Live related projects and with summer only a month away, it seems safe to say that the first half of the year will make history (or not) by being one of the quietest period in the life of our Messenger client… what better time to announce the following?

Messenger Plus! Live 4.21 has been released! yeah! a new version! baked so recently that you may burn yourself if you click on the download button too quickly (consider yourself warned). Once served, the first thing you’ll notice is that it contains less fat than before with a total weight of only 3.7MB per portion: it’s healthier for your internet connection and your computer won’t taste the difference. This new version is largely composed of minor fixes with a touch of improvements such as support for the recently added I’m emoticon (use it!), a better environment for script developers, new notification options for opened conversations, better chat logs for some users, a new Turkish translation, etc… people who want cool new features can always get what they’re searching for in the scripts database like Reminder+ which will remind some people of the old Scheduler from Messenger Plus! 3, Plus!Mail to write quick emails to whoever you want without having to leave Messenger, Stat Center to gather an impressive amount of statistics of anything happening in your Messenger and of course, the WDZ fan club script which is a must for anybody who visits the Messenger Plus! forums regularly.

In this new version, you’ll probably notice something else that’s new and if you read the previous news post, chances are that you already guessed what it is: a special “gold” Messenger Plus! icon has been added in the contact list and it’s the icon you’ll soon have to click on to access the very special 6th anniversary contest! I know some of you were expecting the contest to open on the same day of the release but you’ll have to wait a little more. The contest is in its final test phase, it’s big, very big, and because people will be required to have the new 4.21 version to participate, it has been decided that everything will start about a week from now.

More information about this exciting event in two days, on the 19th .

It’s already been 3 months since the last update and still, I feel like I didn’t have enough time to create the new version I desired. Well, new versions got to be released one day or another and it’s a well known facts that developers tend to keep pushing deadlines forever. So, here it is ladies and gentleman, boys and girls, moogles and bangaas: Messenger Plus! Live 4.20 :).

Among the updates, you’ll find complete and proper support for Windows Vista, a new enhanced text copy feature, several fixes, improved compatibility with some systems and new additions to the scripting API (check out the updated documentation for that one). Also, as it was announced previously, this new version includes all 9 winning scripts of last year’s contest, for a limited time only, updated for your pleasure.

Installation of each of the scripts is presented as an option during setup. If you do give them a try, I’d like to point out that a few antivirus programs out there (like McAfee) tend to consider almost any script activity as “suspicious”: don’t worry, there is absolutely nothing wrong with any of the scripts you’ll find on this site. This behaviour is rather ridiculous as these faulty products will warn you about an unknown script creating a text file while they’ll ignore an unknown program deleting your system files. To solve this problem, you can either put the Messenger executable in your exclusion list, disable the “script scanning” option of your antivirus or, and that’s what I would recommend, get a better antivirus program, one that’s not trying to impress you by detecting anything and just does its job like it’s supposed to do.

I hope you’ll have a great experience with all the new features provided by these scripts. Remember that each of them can be enabled/disabled/removed in the Preferences panel of Messenger Plus!, allowing you to precisely customize the way you want your Messenger to behave. Many developers worked a long time to bring these new features to you and they all deserve many thanks (feel free to use the forums for that). Also, if you like the idea of adding even more options to your Messenger, remember to check the online database where 250 more script packages are waiting for you! They’re all free, all clean, all good :).