Today a Macintosh orientated Web site in The Netherlands, MacOSX.nl, posted that the release date for MSN Messenger 5.0 for Mac is August 9th, 2005. The site also adds a previously undisclosed feature to the already known feature list. Apparently, the new Mac version will allow connecting to other protocols.
Author Archive for immi
The official versions of MSN Messenger support webcam chatting. Unfortunatly 3rd-party clients like GAIM or Adium X (client for Mac OS X) do not. The reason for this was that a special codec is used which is created by Logitech and Microsoft.
But this webcam codec has been reverse-engineered by Ole Andre Vadla Ravnas of the Farsight project (audio/video conferencing framework for instant messengers).
From the readme:
It was written because there was no third-party MSN-client that supported this feature due to this proprietary/unknown codec involved. I didn’t like this lack of interoperability, so I decided to do something about it. After studying the official MSN-client a little closer, it became clear that the codec involved was statically linked into the executable, so there was no easy way to use the codec code through Wine. So for fun, and challenge, I reverse-engineered the original implementation by studying the massive amount of assembly code involved, and after a lot of hard work I ended up with this implementation in C.
Check it out at jblinux.net/libmimic/.
SNS Bank has introduced Bill. A micro-payment system which uses MSN Messenger.
People could give up their email and they would be mailed when the service would start. And yes, they mailed. One problem: they send out the email, but with everyone in the TO: field. What does that mean? Everyone receiving the mail can see your email. So much for privacy and the assurance that they won’t leak your email.
Next time, please use the BCC =)
Dutch SNS bank will soon introduce ‘Bill’, an online payment system for the younger generation. It’s going to be integrated into MSN Messenger using a custom tab. It can be used to pay online, for example webshops, but it can also be used for payments between users.
When paying to a company (e-commerce site) the receiver will have to pay 5% of the payment with a maximum of 60 euro-cents. If it is a transaction between users then it will be ‘a few cents’ per transaction.
Microsoft reports that there are some known issues with the MSN Messenger 7 beta (7.0.632)
It is not recommended that the general public uses this beta of course, but if you like to live on the edge go ahead and find yourself a copy.
- Winks can only be sent from build 7.0.632 to build 7.0.632. The leaked build (7.0.604) and the public beta (7.0.425) cannot receive winks from the latest Beta build. This will be fixed in the refresh.
- New MSN Mobile features such as sending a text message to a contact from your mobile phone or viewing messages sent to your MSN Messenger account from a mobile user when offline will not be immediately available.
- The MSN Messenger beta build will not be added to major Firewall provider safelists and may cause your firewall software to display a security error. Please manually allow the MSN Messenger software access to the Internet. Please contact your firewall provider for more information if you are unsure of how to do this.
- Full-screen Video Conversations may crash on Windows 98.
- Installation of the Beta version on Windows Media Center Edition is not supported.
- Issues may be experienced with Winks if the installed version of Macromedia Flash is not up to date. Please update to the latest version of flash at http://messenger.msn.com/flash
- It is recommended that Windows 98 and Windows ME users upgrade to Internet Explorer 6.0 before running the MSN Messenger Beta.
- Some international character sets or "Double Byte Character Sets may overlap or cause the font and/or font size to change.
- The "Customer Experience Improvement Program" menu item under Help may be inactive. To get around this, please click on Tools > Options > General.
- When signing in as anything but "Online", the ad in the main window is not clickable.
- Localized (non-English) builds of MSN Messenger will only be able to seen the English-United States winks and the names may not match.
