Shoutbox

Good evening,

It's now official, Messenger Plus! is proudly used by more than 10,000,000 Messenger addicts! the symbolic barrier was broken this week, giving me 10,000,000 more reasons to continue to work on Messenger Plus! Live 4.00 .

It seems that my sudden disappearance from the forums started to worry some people (who were apparently not really worried for me but for the add-on's future, I still wonder if I should be glad about that) so here am I, posting good news and wishing you once again a Happy New Year. The next generation of Messenger Plus! is progressing well, Beta 1 is scheduled to be released to selected beta testers in the first week of February. Re-coding everything is taking a tremendous amount of time but it has its rewards. Not one feature is being recreated without being seriously improved. I'm still worrying if I'll be able to complete the project in time (some of the planned features may be pushed back to version 4.10) but I'm still confident you will all have some good surprises.

Talking about good surprises, I thought you may enjoy a sneak preview of one of the features that's already been completed: the chat logs. This feature was introduced in Messenger by Messenger Plus! 1.00, almost five years ago. Since then, Microsoft added many things to Messenger, including its own chat logging feature. It was about time to create a brand new version of the feature, and here's the result: chat log from Messenger Plus! Live 4.00.

In addition to plain text logging, you now have the possibility to log your chats in XHTML and the logs will include colors, Messenger emoticons, any kind of custom emoticons you have, winks (as thumbnails), even ink messages! All of that in stylized page fully customizable if you provide your own CSS file. Also, those of you who can't live without encryption won't be disappointed: chat logging encryption has also been rewritten and now features a 1,024bits key pair (customizable up to 16,384bits) protected by a 256bits AES symmetric key (which is the latest algorithm provided in standard by Microsoft in Windows XP).

If chat logging doesn't interest you all that much, don't worry, everything else in the software will get the same treatment. All you have to do now is wait for the new version to come out (sorry, no release date can be announced for now). Until then, you can be sure than we'll all working very hard to double the excitement you'll get from Windows Live Messenger.

Thank you for reading!
Patchou