In the MIX with Yahoo! Messenger for Vista

You've got to give Yahoo! some credit for really pushing the Vista stuff here:

This week, our Yahoo! Messenger for Vista team is at the Microsoft MIX conference in Las Vegas (March 5-7). The MIX conference is a chance for developers utilizing Microsoft platforms to discuss new ideas and technologies, as well as share what they’ve created.

Great work is continuing on Yahoo! Messenger for Vista, and members of the team will be meeting with reporters and technologists at MIX to give them a preview of what’s coming up in the next Beta release. We wanted to make sure our readers and users got a sneak peek as well.

The key feature in the next Beta release will be voice, allowing users to make free PC-to-PC calls and low-cost PC-to-Phone calls right from their PC. And if you have a Phone In number, you will also be able to receive calls from your friends in Yahoo! Messenger for Vista.

As part of the voice feature, our designers have been working on some cool voice visualizations for the product that leverage the WPF 3D integration. So even if you’re not having a very interesting phone conversation, we guarantee you’ll be mesmerized by the awesome effects.

While we don’t have a definitive release date for this next Beta version of Yahoo! Messenger for Vista, we’ll keep you posted here on the blog. In the meantime, if you are running Windows Vista, please download and try out the preview version available at http://messenger.yahoo.com/vista.

Looking good. I'm not a Yahoo! Messenger user, but I wish Microsoft's IM app looked this good in Vista.

Discuss this Article 3

brostbeef
on Mar 7, 2008
I like a lot of what Microsoft comes up with for developers, however, how do they expect companies to adopt their technology when they won't even use it themselves. Live Messenger SHOULD have a WPF version! This isn't the only thing I'm upset with either. Stuff like Ultimate Extras (duh!), but also about things like gadgets. The last time I heard of a new Microsoft Gadget was for Dell's Project (RED) initiative. Surprisingly, they seem to be doing things right with Silverlight. They have gone out and started to get people to use it AND they use it too! What a concept for a company to develop an environment and use that environment to develop HIGH QUALITY products! (Note: this does not mean a 10 minute demo product. It needs to be something which is distributed and supported) The development community is a fickle bunch. Great tools are great. Great documentation is better, but having an active developing community is priceless and absolutely necessary for growth. It seems Apple kinda gets this. They have reserved $100 million to spur development (if I understood it all correctly). But regardless, Microsoft needs to invest more in the development community if it wants its products to be used.
Waethorn
on Mar 8, 2008
"Live Messenger SHOULD have a WPF version!" They designed it to be streamlined, and to be able to run on the widest set of hardware available. Utilizing WPF and giving you fancy DirectX9 Pixel Shaders would be great and all, but there's still people using Pentium 3's who upgraded to XP from something prior and use Messenger that wouldn't be able to run it smoothly if they radically changed the UI.
johnpapola
on Mar 10, 2008
WPF appears to be a real move forward and very comparable to Quartz on Mac OSX. Paul, do you have any thoughts on why there seems to be so few applications making use of Vista's new programming model after more than a year? Not to start another platform war, but Mac third party developers seem to be far quicker in adopting new OS technologies and UI conventions than Windows devs. There's already been a whole host of OSX apps updated to use core animation and conform to Leopards UI conventions. Any windows devs with an opinion on this?

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