Shoutbox

Hey everyone.

Well it's been a busy couple of weeks for me and I have sort of disappeared amongst the work I have been doing.

Firstly, Open Live has been doing pretty well and it looks like a lot of people are taking advantage of the ease of use. I have received a lot of positive feedback and thank all those that have had input into the project.

But now its time to move onto the future. The first thing is as you may or may not have noticed already is that Open Live will soon be getting a port over to Windows Live Messenger 9.0 beta. This means that skins will be able to support 9.0 beta a bit easier than what it is now.

This port has been created by Nile and features a few improvements that were created specifically for 9. The good news is that since Microsoft announced that 9 was going to close its beta phase until later on in the year it means that Open Live 9 will have a pretty long life (well for a beta resource anyway)

Now onto the next thing.

As you guys and girls know the skinning contest is coming our way and is going to be one of the biggest events to hit this community this year. It will give skin makers the chance to show off their work and compete to be the best.

For those wondering no I am not entering the contest as it has already been agreed by myself and Patchou that I would not to make things fairer and interesting.

Anyway this is where the exciting news comes in.

I have started up a wiki website for everyone to use during the progress of the contest. This website will be your one stop skinning resource with articles on how to get the best of Open Live as well as several references such as UIFile purposes (yes including stuff for WLM 9 Beta as well) Work has already begun and there are a few articles online now (but not many). Anyway this is where I need a bit of help. I am putting out the call for people who want to help out with the wiki's creation by being contributors.

The documentation is a pretty big process so I know that if I try to tackle it all by myself you won't be seeing any new skin releases from me in a long time. My plan is to start a section on the wiki which has a whole bunch of tutorials using Open Live to create them. With these I am hoping that skinning will reach a new level of popularity and we will begin to see everyones work grow and mature a bit.

But yeah there will plenty of information up by the time the contest does indeed start so be on the lookout. For those who are interested in becoming a contributor just reply to this thread. Keep in mind that it would be good to also get stuff on Messenger as well (i.e the history of Messenger, Messenger Plus! etc) so yeah it won't all just be about skinning.

If the wiki gets enough support I might look into also getting the site translated for other languages (if enough translators are interested that is)

Anyway yeah thats about it for now.

Willz.