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Get to know the contact search bar

June 5, 2007 on 7:50 am | In Features | 22 Comments

At the top of the Yahoo! Messenger window lurks an often overlooked, but handy piece of the interface: the contact search bar. Aptly named, it lets you quickly find a friend in your contact list and start a conversation with them, whether it’s over IM, email, SMS or voice. And even if someone’s not in your contact list or address book, you can just enter a Yahoo! ID, phone number or email to get started.

A handy shortcut for accessing the contact search bar is the Windows + Y keyboard shortcut (the Windows key is that one in the lower left that looks like a waving flag). No matter where you are on your computer, this will bring up the Messenger window with the cursor in the contact search bar. This even works when your Messenger window is closed.

When you type a friend’s name in the search bar, the available communication options will appear in a drop down menu below the bar. What’s available depends on what information you have stored for that friend in your address book. For example, if you have a friend’s mobile phone number, you can click to send an SMS message to their phone or click to call their mobile using Yahoo! Voice. Clicking “Send Email” will start a new email message to them in your computer’s default email program.

You can use the contact search bar to start a conversation with anyone, even if they’re not in your address book. I was searching for London hotels the other day and needed to call one of them. I wanted to use my low calling rate on Yahoo! Voice, so I copied the phone number from the hotel website, hit Windows +Y on my keyboard and pasted the number into the contact search bar. I then selected “Call Phone Number”. Ring, ring – I was connected.

And to do justice to the “search” part of its name, you can also start a web search from the bar. Just enter any term and click “Search the web” in the drop down menu. I did this by accident once when I typed in a friend’s name – I learned all kinds of new things about him!

The search bar also works within the Address Book view. Just switch modes from your contact list to address book by clicking the Address Book icon () above the bar, then start your search. When a friend’s contact info comes up, you can click to IM, call a phone number, SMS or email. The difference with the address book view is that the actual phone numbers, email addresses and Yahoo! IDs are visible, and you can click to access your friend’s full listing.

Sarah Bacon
Product Manager

An Apple a day…

June 1, 2007 on 7:54 am | In Mac version | 47 Comments

I sat down with Matthew Skyrm, Senior Director of Product Management for Messenger. Alongside his duties running the Windows clients, he’s also the head honcho for the Mac version. I gave him my best “Puss-‘n-Boot” eyes and said “Matthew, the Mac natives are restless and I need some Mac material, news, anything.” OK, it didn’t go down like that – it was less dramatic and took place in a windowless conference room. But I did get some good info from him and our first Messenger for Mac post is here . There’s a little something for everyone – a couple of tips and some news about the next Beta…

First the tips… I asked Matthew about his favorite gems in the Mac version. Without hesitation, he started explaining the Command + N keyboard shortcut. When you hit this while you’re in Messenger for Mac, a contact search box appears and you can type in any part of a contact’s name to quickly find them and IM. While there’s also a Message button at the bottom of the Messenger List window, this lets you keyboard lovers run at full speed.

“Ok, that’s a good timesaver but what else you got?” This next one was cool – I had seen it before but since I spend my days on a PC, I hadn’t made use of it. There’s a feature built into the Mac version that lets you create a display image using your webcam. Use your built-in iSight camera or any other webcam that’s connected. Suddenly imitating emoticons with my face and sticking them into my display image became very entertaining… To access this, go into Preferences and click on Display Image.

Matthew also showed me some deeper personalization you can do in the Mac version around friend alerts. You can assign different alert behaviors and even sounds for different friends. So if you have a special friend and you always want to know when he or she comes online, you can tell Messenger for Mac to play a custom sound (choose one or upload your own) and even bounce the Messenger dock icon.

“Yeah, yeah, great Sarah. What about the next Beta?” Isn’t it amazing how I can read your thoughts? . While Matthew doesn’t yet have a firm date for the next release, he did confirm a couple of the new features that will be in it. As we mentioned in an earlier post, chat rooms will make their debut in the next Beta. The new version will also offer tabbed conversations (woo hoo!). Plus, conversation archiving will be available and will be searchable from Spotlight. So the next time you can’t recall whether your friend sent you their phone number over IM or email, you can just run a Spotlight search to quickly find out.

Stay tuned to the blog for future news on the next Yahoo! Messenger for Mac Beta.

Sarah Bacon
Product Manager

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