Shoutbox

Well, it's kind of a sad day for me, because I'm not doing this out of frustration with the product (although, I will mention a couple bugs in a minute), but I have uninstalled Messenger Plus! from all three of my computers.

Why? Well, to be honest, I just don't use it that much. In fact, other than tabbed chats (which is still pretty flaky) and personal away messages, I don't use any of the current Plus! features.

I used to use sounds all the time... but the problem is that none of my contacts have Plus! so they can't experience them the way I do. I have never used the automatic accept options, and I prefer the built-in logging functionality (not saying Plus! is bad in that respect), and well... even Personalized Status is lacking one function I really really miss from the old version.

I mentioned tabbed chats being flaky... not seriously so, but the inability to ALT-TAB to the window is VERY annoying (and has been reported since 4.x was released), and often times when I click on the taskbar button I have to "fiddle" with it to make the window re-open from a minimized state. Not annoying enough to make me angry about Plus! but annoying enough to shut the feature off.

I love Personalized Status... I like being able to have it echo back friendly messages! Why the "Disable Personalized Messages for this window" option was removed from the IM Window's Plus! menu, I don't understand. I still wish the listing of presets was alphabetized too.

One ability I would like to see added would be to record audio and video conversations as mp3 and mpg files and call it multimedia logging.

I like the *idea* of scripts... but a) I'm not a developer [no matter how easy it may be], and b) for some on these threads, it has become a cop-out for shooting down new feature ideas... "Oh just write a script! ..... and then share it with the rest of us!" (That's not the way "open-source" efforts are supposed to work, btw).

Don't get the wrong idea... Patchou is a great guy and is clearly committed to the product. I really LIKE the product a lot, too... but it no longer fits my needs, so I felt obligated to remove it. I will continue to support the use of the product, and I will keep an eye on new versions and try them out if I see features I want or need. For now, however, I've removed it and felt it was appropriate to come here and share reasons for doing so.

Best Regards,
Aaron M. Hall
GoodThings2Life