In case you wouldn’t have noticed already, Messenger Plus! Live 4.81 was released two weeks ago. We are so busy working on the next major release that we simply forgot to make a proper announcement about it. This new version includes improvements such as proper sorting of chat logs in the Log Viewer and a new way to support Messenger Plus! with the new plusnetwork.com home page (still in beta, not distributed to everywhere).

If you visit the Skins and Scripts section of this site, you’ll also notice an avalanche of new products, all free, all designed to improve your Messenger experience, technically and visually. We’re still working on the new database web site, in the meantime, please take a couple of minutes to browse our pages of listings :-). This month, we’re also getting a special treat from Willz: not 1 but 4 complex skins based on the forthcoming Transformers 2 movie. The first skin, Optimus Prime, is already available for download, the next ones will be released once a week until the end of the month.

Just a quick post to let you know that we’re currently working on the forum servers, they will be back as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience.

We’ve just completed the final move to what is now the new home of Emotion Sounds. We’re sorry if you experienced problems during the past week with this feature, things have been bumpy since last autumn because of the amount of people using this feature continuously. More than 4 billion sounds have been sent since activation and the original server array was suffering from it, begging to be put to rest, despite the repeated improvements.

You can now enjoy sending emotion sounds again, rapidly and without worrying about errors. I can’t promise there won’t be any surprise this week while we adjust the new servers but things look very good so far. Don’t be shy and try out some new sounds from mpsounds.net to have some fun while chatting today. It’s free, as always, so think about sending sounds on Messenger instead of buying things with your Facebook points ;-). Thank you for your patience.

After a longer than usual beta period, the new Messenger Plus! is finally ready and can be found in the download section of this site. Of course, the main attraction of version 4.80 is full compatibility with the latest version of Messenger, Windows Live Messenger 2009, and when we say “full compatibility”, we mean just that. You won’t find any ”light” trimmed-down version of your add-on here.

Despite the lack of visual changes in the software, the change log shows that many things were done under the hood. As often, scripts and skins in particular got their good share of improvements. There are now more than 500 of them in the official databases of this site. This means that you could spend the next month customizing Messenger with Plus!, its scripts and its skins and you would still haven’t seen everything. Big thanks to all the developers who keep on working on these improvements to make our daily IM life better.

In addition to the bug fixes and cosmetic improvements, this new Messenger Plus! also allows external developers to modify Messenger’s encoded windows’ files (UIB files) like they did with previous versions of Messenger. More information about that can be found in the skinning documentation. Note to all the developers reading this: Messenger Plus! is not required to be installed on your users’ computers for this feature to be used. The UIB files generated by Messenger Plus! can be read by Messenger just like the original ones which means that you can do the modifications you want on your system, encode the files and distribute the final result with your application.

Thank you for your renewed trust and support :-). Let’s have another great year together!