Developers at Yahoo built the Messenger client for Vista with the new operating system’s capabilities in mind, particularly the look and feel of Vista…
Last night, Yahoo opened the pre-beta preview version of “Yahoo Messenger for Vista,” with graphic features that appear to be more at home in the Vista environment than with XP.
The Yahoo Messenger blog noted this preview release sports an entirely new interface. This draws from the Windows Presentation Foundation, Microsoft’s graphics subsystem in use with Vista.
“A demo was shown at CES in January 2007, however performance was noted to be poor and as a result there has been a 12 month delay in getting the first beta out.”
Although cross-protocol IM clients have the edge for those with contacts on multiple services, Yahoo’s Messenger beta for Vista does a nice job of integrating with the Vista platform and allows you to send IMs to both your Yahoo and Windows Live Messenger contacts.
“So how does Yahoo Messenger for Vista compare to existing Yahoo and Windows Live products?”
Yahoo Messenger Beta comes with a few cool new features. For example, you can now change the layout and color of your IM contact list, have a sidebar gadget which keeps important contacts separate from the conversation window and a handy tabbed conversation window to simplify multiple conversations and much more.
Yahoo’s newest version of its Messenger client has been designed from the ground up for Vista, with an interface different from all prior incantations, built upon the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF).
Pros:
File Transfers — With Yahoo Messenger beta, you can now send files up to 2GB and can send IMs to both your Yahoo contacts and your Windows Live Messenger contacts.
Tab organization, enhanced emoticons, and the ability to skin individual IM windows list among the features.
As with other versions of Yahoo Messenger — this client can IM Windows Live Messenger clients. People can drag and drop contacts from Yahoo Messenger to the Windows Sidebar gadget and track them from there.
Cons:
Performance – not great, especially given the 12month gap in getting this from CES to now. Looks like they might need another 6 months or so until release in order to refine it, which although not a bad thing, could mean they drop some more advanced features from the final release.
Plenty of work remains for Yahoo to do with the Vista version of Messenger. 64-bit support is on the list of future developments, along with almost every multimedia and messaging feature that is not a direct IM to another IM client.
This is definitely an area where Microsoft is improving its own support quite rapidly; hopefully this will filter out to those building on Microsoft technologies.
However, while it looks good in Vista, Yahoo Messenger is still lacking some key features found on other platforms. For example, there seems to be no support for webcam, chat rooms, voice chats, conferencing or IMVironments, SMS and more. These features are the key for any IM service and are likely to be available with the next Vista release.
Josh Jacobson, Senior Product Manager of Yahoo Messenger for Vista; has made it abundantly clear that this preview version needs to be discussed in public, noting several times in press releases and the preview video the myriad ways in which testers can let Yahoo know their opinions.
Since this is only a preview version intended to gather reactions from the public, it is missing many of the features familiar to previous Yahoo releases.
A direct download of the preview is available here:
messenger.yahoo.com/download_vista.php.
If the “feedback” button built into the messenger is not enough, you may fill out a feedback form here:
http://feedback.help.yahoo.com/feedback.php?.src=MSNGRVISTA&.from=web
Preview the promo of latest version of Yahoo Messenger beta here:
http://messenger.yahoo.com/webmessengerpromo.php