In the end, 6 months were necessary to create this update… 6 months! Looking back, I can’t believe time has passed so fast. This all started out like a standard minor update, destined to be labeled 4.30. I was working on it while most of you were clicking on the 6th Anniversary Contest grid. Then, an idea came up about improving the looks of the Plus! windows, followed by an urge to change everything, and when I finally decided to complete the skinning engine I had started 2 years ago, I knew the update would require more than another week to complete.
Here we are now, in December, 2 weeks away from Christmas, and the update has finally been uploaded to the servers! Not only that but the web site got a serious make-over as well. Everything looks nicer, everything works better; it is now up to you to decide whether or not all these changes were worth the efforts. Once again, I have to thank all the testers, all the translators, the graphic designers and the people in charge of the servers. They are all valuable members of the community, their help is precious and without them, Plus! wouldn’t be the software you know today.
As discussed in previous news posts, the main highlight of this update is skinning. You can now change the appearance of your Messenger, rapidly and securely. All the pictures can be modified, the windows re-shaped and the elements re-colorized… sky is the limit! Some of the testers did a lot of work in the past few weeks to showcase their talents and demonstrate how to work with the system. The resulting skins can be downloaded from the official Skins Database, a new section of msgpluslive.net. Note that some of these skins are not considered “final” (polished enough) by their creators yet but they’re worth downloading nonetheless.
If you’re interested in creating your own Messenger skin, check out the documentation included with Messenger Plus!, visit the help forum, take a look at the current skins to see how they were created and submit your creation when it’s ready to shine! More than 10 million scripts have been downloaded from the Scripts Database since last year already and skins promise to be as popular if not more. Remember that the success of this feature will mostly depend on your submissions so if you feel inspired, possess some basic technical knowledge and got some time ahead of you, don’t be shy and give the system a try! One last thing: in case you’d be wondering, yes, a skinning contest will indeed be organised early next year and every existing skin will be eligible :-).
Of course, skinning is only one of the many new things offered by this version. The Preferences panel has been re-designed with many new options added all over the place, Script developers can now enjoy new API functions as well as a much better built-in editor with support for IntelliSense and outlining, the Log Viewer has been completely reworked with features like “search in files” and “maximize view”, the Contact List Clean-Up now offers a “show contacts who have me in their list” mode, Contact Information windows give more information about your contacts, new event notifications are conveniently shown in the notification area of your chat windows, the uninstaller includes a Repair mode and is UAC friendly, etc… The sheer size of the Change Log alone should be enough to convince you that this is not a simple refresh of version 4.23.
Note: the software is still available in more than 20 languages, however, translation of the new web site’s pages will take another week or two to be completed. The web site itself is to be considered work-in-progress for some days. Translating from one language to another is a hard and time consuming job. All the translation teams did a tremendous job on the software already, I didn’t feel I could ask more from them before the software was released and people could enjoy the result of the efforts. The good news is that even more pages than before will be translated once the work is done.
That’s it for today. I hope you’ll all be pleased with the update. 22 million of you are now using Messenger Plus!. To me, that’s 22 million reasons to keep on working on it :-).
Enjoy!
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