The reason why the
Custom Name feature has been depricted is indeed because Windows Live Messenger now has a
Nickname feature.
During development, many beta testers also requested that the Custom Name feature would be brought back. Patchou is aware of this.
However, for this first release choices need to be made and it was not included. It is still possible that it will be added back in a future version though. Only time will tell.
The reason why the Custom Name feature of Plus! is far more usefull than the Nickname feature of WLM is because of one simple reason: With the Nickname feature of WLM you can not see the contact's orginal screenname, nor email, when you have set a nickname.
The usefullness of the Custom Name feature in Plus! comes from the fact that you could use the
special tags (!N) and (!M) as part of the Custom Name to show the contact's original screenname or email. Making it possible to set custom names like:
"John: (!N)" which would be seen as:
"John: this is my original screen name"
If enough people
vote on the poll to bring back the Custom Name feature (
and if it is technically possible!!) I'm sure Patchou might speed up the development of it.
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On a personal note and without taking technical issues into account:
In short: There would be no need to replace anything...
Not so short: One way to integrate the Custom Name feature into the new Nickname feature is to
simply add support for the (!N) and (!M) tags into WLM's nickname feature. This also means there is no need for extra control panels and such as WLM already provides this.
Though, there is one problem with this: Messenger Plus! needs a unique way to indentify names in the contactlist. Previously this was done by actually showing the emailaddresses instead of the screennames in the contactlist. Then Plus! could easly and uniquely identify each contact and replace the visible emailaddress with either a custom name or the screenname again. Hence what you was was a contactlist with (custom) names.
When WLM shows nicknames, there is no unique way to identify each individual contact in the contactlist as names are not something unique; two people can have the same name. Thus there is no way for Plus! to know who is who and thus can't replace the line you see in the contactlist with a Custom Name.
There is possible workaround though: Set the contactlist to show emailaddresses (like previously) and grab the nickname from WLM's own database. Put here is probably the catch: to be able to retrieve the set nickname (and thus also the "custom name") from WLM's encrypted files.
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