Finally, Yahoo unveils its Vista Messenger

Well, sort of. Yahoo! Messenger for Windows Vista is still a beta, nearly a year after it was first previewed at CES 2007 (and months after I wondered out loud why it was taking so long). An incomplete beta, no less.

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Long Zheng has some screen shots and sharp analysis. No doubt he will do a pixel-by-pixel analysis of the icons in the Messenger window. I bow to his superior knowledge and this critique:

The major disappointment is the lack of voice, video and sharing capabilities which were widely fanfared and demonstrated at CES. These features simply don’t exist in this version which leaves this client nothing more than just a fancy text instant messenger. The official blog states explains these features and more are coming in future releases which I hope isn’t on a 12-month cycle.

I will, nonetheless, give it a try.

Update: The How-To Geek has more and whizzier screen shots but concludes: “They are supposed to be adding a lot more features over the next year, but I think I’ll stick with Pidgin or Adium since I don’t really use Yahoo messenger anyway…”

4 thoughts on “Finally, Yahoo unveils its Vista Messenger

  1. Its about friggin time! This might be the only WPF app out there that Microsoft didn’t pay someone to make as a demo.

    Are you even aware of any WPF apps that are non-microsoft?

  2. Problem is this is only 32-bit vista. I might as well downgrade once again to 32-bit just to run this 😦

  3. I downloaded the application, and find it quite refreshing, the avatar creation is so neat. The way the app shines and stands out shows that , if your not a lazy programmer, and sit on past code, there are some exciting new apps that can take advantage of WPF.

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