14 DAY TRIAL // Yahoo Messenger for Windows Vista was initially introduced at the 2007 International Consumer Electronics Shows in Las Vegas. It took the Sunnyvale Internet giant almost 12 months to produce the first public Beta version of the instant messaging client. One year later, after the completion of the 2008 International CES, Yahoo brings to the table Yahoo Messenger for Vista Refresh. Designed to be a killer application, specifically tailored on Microsoft's latest Windows client, and leveraging the Windows Presentation Foundation to the core, Yahoo Messenger for Vista is crawling forward in its evolution process.
Not only is Yahoo not making any consistent headway with the development of its IM client for Vista, but Josh Jacobson, Senior Product Manager, Yahoo! Messenger for Vista, revealed that: "We still have a lot of work to do but hope that these various fixes and enhancements make the Yahoo! Messenger for Vista Preview version even more enjoyable." A lot of work sounds like the final version of Yahoo Messenger for Vista is not even on the horizon. Throughout 2007 in fact the official webpage of the instant messaging client promised that the application would be made available "soon." And soon proved to be an entire year. Can you guess what "a lot of work" means?
"Take a deep breath?and smell the refresh! In response to user feedback and some issues we wanted to fix ourselves, a refreshed version of Yahoo! Messenger for Vista Preview (2008.01.11.428) is now available," Jacobson said. "We've improved overall responsiveness, including typing and switching between tabs and windows. In addition, we tackled some of the odd crashes that were occurring, so you should also find this version more stable overall."
But on top of the performance and stability improvements, Yahoo also delivered enhancements to the graphical user interface, a boost in reliability for the sidebar gadget and resolves for a variety of bugs. As far as small functionality issues are concerned, Yahoo dealt with the sign-in glitches of the instant messaging client. On top of this, users will now be able to enjoy fully functional scrolls in the message window and, in addition, Yahoo Messenger for Vista Refresh now remembers the open/close status of groups from one session to another.
"Now you can make the contact list even narrower. You'll also find that some menus, like the display image picker, have been cleaned up and enhanced. Offline messages are more clearly displayed with a new 'While you were out' tag and timestamp to denote the message. We know some of you have had trouble loading and using the sidebar gadget that comes along with Yahoo! Messenger for Vista. We've made some changes that should make it possible now to drag and drop a contact into the sidebar if you're on a 64-bit version of Vista. We also got rid of the red 'X' that sometimes appeared in place of a contact's image," Jacobson added.
Yahoo! Messenger Vista Preview Refresh can be downloaded via this link. But at this pace the final version will drop concomitantly with Windows 7.