Thanks for the tip on the tabs, the tab thing annoyed the hell out of me too. For now, I think, it’s just noise getting noisier. Maybe Jabber (and AOL/MSN over-reach) will propel IM into an understood public realm, where users are thought to have discretionary rights. IM, then, will saturate with commerce and those inured to it, and probably won’t interest me. Users clearly opt-in the resources expended are more clearly owned by the IM provider. If there’s downward pressure on email spam there’s none on IM spam. There’s an adult growth edge for IM - newly online grandmothers drunk on the InterWeb, I guess - but the major IM platform-providers only underwrite it as a marketing vehicle. They run AIM and MSN Messenger constantly and know every nuance, technical and commercial. Somehow I lost interest in IM and never regained it.īut children are another story. I, too, was an early adopter of ICQ, and got a few friends and relatives going just for kicks - even rudimentary voice over IP. This reminds me of the politics and positioning that takes place between federal, provincial/state, and municipal politics. Office and XP look different and all of the MSN stuff seems to be happening in a bubble somewhere (a heavily bevelled bubble, I would imagine). Take a look at this comparative screenshot of version 4.7 and 5.0 (also note one of the new improvements in v5.0 – the better layout of the My Status area at the top of the Messenger window). Microsoft’s UI design teams seem to need to implement an entirely different interface scheme for every product line. It is an obscure feature, but totally non-intrusive and handy for those who use it. In 4.x, you could right-click on the alerts (the boxes in the bottom-left corner of the screen that tell you a user has signed-on), and dismiss them quickly. It is too small to decipher, and just adds clutter. However, the tiny butterfly added to the 16×16 pixel system tray icon is too easily confused with the offline or away status indicators. The full-size MSN Butterfly icon included in system32/shell32.dll in XP is absolutely beautifully rendered. For the record, I’m not totally anti-butterfly. The new 5.0 icons include the MSN Butterfly. The icons in Messenger are important, as they are one of the new icons that are always on the screen. Of course, the real test comes in every day use, but for a quick comparison, here are the sounds of both versions (links are WAV files): The sounds may grow on me, but it feels like the like the new sounds are the audio equivalent of the visual changes between Windows 2000 and Windows XP from sharp and subtle to soft and a bit garish. The default ‘user-is-online’, ‘message-sent’, and ‘message-received’ sounds were subtle, distinctive, hard-to-miss, and easy-to-ignore. I’ve always thought the audio in Messenger 4.x was some of the best audio design in any application. I’ve since learned that you can turn this off by un-checking the “ Display MSN Today when Messenger signs in” option still totally unacceptable. This means a pop-up ad every time you boot your computer totally unacceptable. Consider that for most MSN Messenger users, the program loads at start-up. However, I didn’t realize how bad it was until Messenger 5.0 gave me pop-up advertising when it loads ( screenshot). I plan to tell young people this when I get old. I’m not using a shared computer, but this did exactly what I wanted.Įveryone knows the world is going to hell – old people have been telling us this for centuries. In 5.0, I didn’t think it was possible until I stumbled across an obscure setting in the Privacy tab (?) called “ This is a shared computer so don’t display my tabs“. Go to the Tools menu, and toggle the Show Tabs option. In 4.x, turning off the annoying tabs (that I presume no-one uses) was easy.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |