This decision will help us increase efficiencies on our team and deliver one consistent, full-featured product for all of our Windows users. Our application was based on the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) platform which we will continue to experiment with and invest in. The knowledge we gathered from developing Yahoo! Messenger for Vista will also help us improve future versions of our Windows software.

We realize many of you have been with us from the first launch of Yahoo! Messenger for Vista and we want to thank you for trying it and providing great feedback with each new release.

If you’re using Yahoo! Messenger for Vista, you can continue to use it however we will not add any more features or provide product support. To enjoy full Yahoo! Messenger functionality including photo sharing, webcam and chat rooms, we recommend downloading and installing the latest version of Yahoo! Messenger 9.0, which also works on Windows Vista:
http://messenger.yahoo.com/download/win

Thanks again for your support of Yahoo! Messenger for Vista. We look forward to receiving your feedback on the new Yahoo! Messenger 9.0 (just go to the Help menu and choose “Send Feedback…”).

Sarah Bacon
Product Manager

Persistent text formatting
Now when you change your font, text size or color for your IM messages, we’ll save your settings between sessions. So if you like to IM in font size 14 using red letters in Arial Bold, we’ll remember!

Voice improvements
We updated the user interface for the voice feature to make the buttons more clear and added a new voice visualization called “Color Burst”. Plus there’s an updated incoming call notification that appears front and center when a call comes in.

No webcam yet, but we’re making that clear
A lot of our feedback has been from users asking for webcam support or users that look for the webcam feature but can’t find it in the product. Currently, we don’t have webcam support in Yahoo! Messenger for Vista but to shorten our users’ search for it, we added a webcam menu item. Those not in-the-know will get a message telling them that webcam support is coming soon.

                                Download Yahoo! Messenger for Vista

As always, we welcome your feedback on Yahoo! Messenger for Vista. We are thrilled with the amount of feedback we receive. It’s extremely helpful in identifying bugs, nagging issues and other performance problems that we then fix in future releases. So once you’ve downloaded and tried this latest version, be sure to stop by and let us know what you like and don’t like. Feedback form

Speaking of feedback, please also be sure to report any Windows Vista crash errors that you encounter when using the product. You know the window we’re talking about – the one that asks you if you want to send information about the crash or just end now. Every time you report from that window, it sends us valuable (but completely anonymous) information about what happened.

And if you haven’t already, please join our Yahoo! Messenger for Vista group. It’s free and you’ll get first notice of new releases, plus be notified of any special announcements about the product.

Thanks for trying out the latest refresh for Yahoo! Messenger for Vista. We look forward to receiving your feedback!

Josh Jacobson
Senior Product Manager, Yahoo! Messenger

Click anywhere on your Yahoo! Messenger for Vista contact list window. Then hold down the Ctrl key and with your other hand, move the scroll wheel on your mouse up and down. You’ll see the contact list size menu appear and as your roll the wheel, the lever will move and the size of your contacts will change.

The same thing works in the IM window. Click anywhere in the IM window, then hold Ctrl while scrolling your mouse wheel. Voila – instant enlargement of your text (and your emoticons).

Click here to watch a brief video of the feature in action.

Sarah Bacon
Product Manager

You can now make free PC-to-PC calls to other Yahoo! Messenger friends, or if you have a Phone Out account, make low-cost calls to landlines and mobile phones for as low as 1¢ a minute (see rates). Our new voice features also include fun Voice Visualizations that animate you and your friend’s voices while you’re on a call. Be sure to check out the demo video below to see how it works.

We’ve also added support for free text messaging to mobile phones (SMS). Just enter a friend’s mobile phone number, type a message and click Send. Your friend will receive your message on their mobile phone and when they reply back, it comes to you in Yahoo! Messenger for Vista. No more squinting over your small phone screen or wearing out your thumbs. Note that it’s free for you to send SMS messages from Messenger but your friend may incur charges for receiving depending on their mobile data plan.

One of the most requested features in the feedback is e-mail alerts. We’re happy to say that with this new Beta version, you’ll now receive a pop-up alert in the lower right corner of your screen and see a new icon on the contact list window when you have new Yahoo! Mail. Just click either one to go right to your new e-mail. (You can also turn off Mail alerts in preferences).

We’re also going global! We’re thrilled to be launching Yahoo! Messenger for Vista Beta in Germany and Taiwan. These are just the first of many countries we plan to support.

Be sure to watch the brief demo video of Yahoo! Messenger for Vista Beta to see all these new improvements in action:

We really value your feedback and hope that after you try this latest Beta, you’ll stop by our feedback form and tell us what you think, especially regarding Voice Visualizations. You can access the feedback form here, or just click the Feedback button located on the contact list window or at the top of any IM conversation window. We really want to hear from you!

And lastly, please remember that we are still in Beta mode so even this latest version will not have all the features you may love from the classic version of Yahoo! Messenger. From the preview feedback we’ve received we know that you really want webcam video, archiving, photo sharing and more. We are working on these types of features and appreciate your patience while we get them ready.

We hope you enjoy Yahoo! Messenger for Vista Beta; download it here. We look forward to receiving your feedback!

Josh Jacobson
Senior Product Manager, Yahoo! Messenger for Vista

Great work is continuing on Yahoo! Messenger for Vista, and members of the team will be meeting with reporters and technologists at MIX to give them a preview of what’s coming up in the next Beta release. We wanted to make sure our readers and users got a sneak peek as well.

The key feature in the next Beta release will be voice, allowing users to make free PC-to-PC calls and low-cost PC-to-Phone calls right from their PC. And if you have a Phone In number, you will also be able to receive calls from your friends in Yahoo! Messenger for Vista.

As part of the voice feature, our designers have been working on some cool voice visualizations for the product that leverage the WPF 3D integration. So even if you’re not having a very interesting phone conversation, we guarantee you’ll be mesmerized by the awesome effects.

SMS (short message service) will also be part of this next release, allowing users to send text messages from Yahoo! Messenger for Vista to a friend’s mobile phone for free. We will also be adding Yahoo! Mail alerts to this next version due to the large amount of feedback we received from preview users. Yes, your feedback does make a difference!

While we don’t have a definitive release date for this next Beta version of Yahoo! Messenger for Vista, we’ll keep you posted here on the blog. In the meantime, if you are running Windows Vista, please download and try out the preview version available at http://messenger.yahoo.com/vista. Visit our feedback form anytime to tell us what you like and don’t like about your experience. If you’d like to receive additional updates via email, please join the free Yahoo! Messenger for Vista group.

Josh Jacobson
Senior Product Manager, Yahoo! Messenger for Vista

P.S. – If you’re interested in any of the sessions taking place at MIX, you can view them 24 hours after they happen at http://sessions.visitmix.com/.

Matrix mode expands on the tabbed conversations feature in Yahoo! Messenger for Vista. Tabs are handy for keeping your desktop free of multiple IM windows, but sometimes staying on top of all your conversations can be tricky.

Inspired by the grid in the opening credits of The Brady Bunch, hitting Ctrl + Alt + Shift + b on your keyboard will turn your tabbed conversation window into one single window with a matrix of boxes, each showing an IM conversation.

Once you’re in Matrix Mode, just click on the conversation you want to jump into and start typing. A white box around the conversation indicates which one you’re in. As you’re in one conversation, you can easily see messages coming in on the others, so it’s easy to read and respond quickly to IMs. As more conversations open, the layout will adjust to accommodate them.

To activate Matrix Mode, start a few IM conversations and then be sure to condense them into one window as tabs. You can do that by dragging the bottom tab of one window into another, or hitting Ctrl + , (ctrl plus comma) on your keyboard. Once your conversations are in a tabbed window, hit Ctrl + Alt + Shift + b to enter Matrix Mode.

Try it out and then visit our feedback page to let us know how we should develop this feature further!

Sarah Bacon
Product Manager

P.S. – Check out this picture of Product Manager Josh Jacobson during the naming brainstorm for matrix mode. Will the name stick???

In the case of Yahoo! Messenger for Vista, this Hotfix improves the response times when you’re doing things like opening menus that overlay the main interface (like the options menu or skin chooser). According to the WPF team Program Manager blog, installing this Hotfix can improve Vista Layered Windows performance up to 4x (depending on your machine’s specifications).

This Hotfix is available on Microsoft.com through the links below. If you are already running Windows Vista Service Pack 1 Beta, this Hotfix is included and there is no need to download it again. If you prefer not to install individual hotfixes, the Layered Windows Hotfix will be included when the final SP1 release of Windows Vista is available.

Click below to get the Vista Layered Windows Hotfix:

Vista 32-bit users
Vista 64-bit users

If you’re unsure which version of Windows Vista you have, please use the 32-bit link. Note that you need administrator privileges to install this Hotfix, and a restart will be required after installation. If the Hotfix has already been applied to your machine, a “This update does not apply to your machine” message will appear during installation.

Sarah Bacon
Product Manager

Performance & Stability improvements: We’ve improved overall responsiveness, including typing and switching between tabs and windows. In addition, we tackled some of the odd crashes that were occurring, so you should also find this version more stable overall.

A fresh look & feel for some areas: Attention all space-savers: now you can make the contact list even narrower. You’ll also find that some menus, like the display image picker, have been cleaned up and enhanced. Offline messages are more clearly displayed with a new “While you were out” tag and timestamp to denote the message. We also fixed a bug in the contact list so that when you choose to appear offline to a contact in your list, that contact’s name will become italicized (but remain bold).

Sidebar gadget reliability: We know some of you have had trouble loading and using the sidebar gadget that comes along with Yahoo! Messenger for Vista. We’ve made some changes that should make it possible now to drag and drop a contact into the sidebar if you’re on a 64-bit version of Vista. We also got rid of the red “X’ that sometimes appeared in place of a contact’s image.

Various bug fixes: We tackled a fix for some of the sign-in problems that have been reported from some users. We also fixed the bug where the message window wasn’t always scrolling down as the conversation progressed. And lastly, we fixed the contact list to maintain the open or close status of your groups between sessions. So if you open or close a group in your list and then sign out, the next time you sign in, it will appear the same way you left it.

Thanks in advance for installing this latest version and giving it a test drive. As always, please use our feedback form to let us know of any problems you encounter. We still have a lot of work to do but hope that these various fixes and enhancements make the Yahoo! Messenger for Vista Preview version even more enjoyable.

Josh Jacobson
Senior Product Manager, Yahoo! Messenger for Vista

Thanks to everyone for your input on the feedback form and here on the blog regarding the issue. Who knew there were so many 64-bit Vista users out there?

Sarah Bacon
Product Manager

This is a preview version only (pre-beta) so not everything is in here that you might be used to seeing in other versions of Yahoo! Messenger. Here’s a list of the features included today:

- Entirely new interface that harnesses the power of WPF, the graphics subsystem in Windows Vista
- Organize your conversations into tabs, or drag and drop a tab out to create a new window
- Keep up with your favorite contacts by dragging them into the Windows Sidebar gadget
- Send enhanced emoticons that have some extra oomph
- Change the color of your IM windows with a built-in skin chooser. Go crazy with a different skin for every IM window!

- Adjust the display size of your contacts with a handy slider
- Arrange your contact list into multiple columns just by resizing your window
- Send instant messages to your Yahoo! and Windows Live Messenger contacts
- Send files to friends as large as 2 GB
- Find contacts quickly with the contact search bar. Type in a few letters of the contact’s name or ID and they’ll come up in filtered results.
- As-you-type spell checker that’s smart enough to know that “LOL” is not something to correct
- A preferences menu you can access by right-clicking anywhere at the top of the main Messenger window

Check out the screencast to see Yahoo! Messenger for Vista Preview up close (alternate hi quality version):

If you are already running Yahoo! Messenger 8.1 or 9.0 on your Vista PC, you can continue to use it. Messenger for Vista will be installed to a different directory so you can launch one version or the other depending on what you need. Note that Yahoo! Messenger for Vista can only be installed on a Windows Vista operating system.

Many familiar features are not in this preview: voice, webcam, chat rooms, text messaging to mobile phones (SMS), IMVironments, Audibles, plug-ins, photo sharing (though you can send photos via file transfer) and conferencing. We’ll be working on many of these features and 64-bit Vista support for our next releases [64-bit available as of 12/7].

We know it’s been a long wait for Yahoo! Messenger for Vista and we can’t thank you enough for your patience. We really want your feedback on this preview version, so please use our feedback form to let us know what you like, what you don’t like, and which features you’d like to see next.

To keep up with the latest updates and news on Yahoo! Messenger for Vista, please join our Yahoo! Group.

What are you waiting for? Download it now!

Josh Jacobson
Senior Product Manager, Yahoo! Messenger for Vista

P.S. – Congrats to the Messenger for Vista team on the launch! Here are some photos from our launch event tonight (thanks Jeremy!).