After a long time, something actually usable

Feb 20, 2008 20:06 GMT  ·  By

The subtitle is the mark of a long and excruciating pain that I went through when seeing that almost every week or so there was a blog from the Yahoo! Instant Messenger team that said nothing. Nothing of interest, actually: old features presented, the emoticons? story (wasn?t exciting at all, a list of people whom the ideas came from) and some other riffraff about audio features presented as new but that have been included in the package a long time ago. I didn?t know really what to make of it and their strategy of sand throwing in our faces as shown before, so I always assumed that they were working on something big but they needed to blog about something.

The feature isn?t new, it was only hidden, but, alas, useful. The Matrix mode, Product Manager Sarah Bacon wrote, expands on the tabbed conversations while using Yahoo! Messenger for Windows Vista. In case the picture on the left hasn?t caught your eye yet, it?s a means of dealing with all the conversation windows that gathers them all together in a single box so you don?t have to fill your desktop with all of them.

Pressing Ctrl + Alt + Shift + b (any more keys for this combo and it would?ve required a family member?s help with the rest) will activate the Matrix and gather all your IM windows into one, and the way they are displayed is, erm? like in a matrix.

"To activate Matrix Mode, start a few IM conversations and then be sure to condense them into one window as tabs. You can do that by dragging the bottom tab of one window into another, or hitting Ctrl + , (ctrl plus comma) on your keyboard. Once your conversations are in a tabbed window, hit Ctrl + Alt + Shift + b to enter Matrix Mode," Sarah says.

Enjoy this but take you time. It?s not like they will be rolling out something new anytime soon.