All about Windows Live Messenger, providing news, reviews, support, and information for developing and improving your Messenger experience.
Some news from the Mac side of things. This snippet is from the MacWorld News pages:
Microsoft Messenger for Mac 6.0, a new version of Microsoft’s instant messaging application, is coming “later this year,” according to the company. It will include features such as federation with Yahoo! Messenger, customized emoticons and spell check. Users will also be able to display personal messages or what song’s playing in iTunes.
As it looks, we will – again – have to wait for video and voice support.
As reported a couple of months ago, shaneh was doing some research into the personal message feature of MSN Messenger 7. If you weren’t following the topic, Kryton discovered three other options: Games, Office and Empty. As for their uses, Overdo reports the following:
The Games icon could be used to either show you are playing the games in Messenger, or to allow users to invite you directly into a game session. It is exactly the same icon that is already in conversation windows and is used to start games with your contacts. The Office integration into Messenger could reflect a number of possible events, perhaps something similar to the existing Application Sharing feature but allowing collaboration on Office Documents over Messenger. This would be especially useful in a corporate environment where documents are frequently sent back and forth via email with mark-ups showing suggested changes.
This ‘hidden’ little feature has been getting a bit more exposure over the past few days, and doggie has put together a Visual Basic .NET example of how to use them. Compiled version also by timothy linked below also.
Download: SetMsnInfoExample.vb (Visual Basic .NET)
Download: MSN Icon test application (doggie and timothy)
View: MSN Personal Message Changer (noroom)
Forum: Msn Messenger 7 Current Playing Song | Original Method
There’s currently a discussion going on in the forum about how to set your current playing song in build 604 of MSN Messenger 7. The author of the Toaster plug-in for Winamp, shaneh, posted the C source code for it and silverspeed has posted working Visual Basic 6 source code.
CookieRevised has also written a lot of improved code with detailed commenting.
Update: Newer releases of MSN Messenger now use a different method, shaneh already has it covered. Check out both topics for full information.