As usual, you can read about every improvements and bug fixes in the change log. You can also give your thanks to the translators and the beta testers who help make sure Messenger Plus! keeps being reliable and dependable, every step of the way. Among the improvements, because so many users now enjoy skins and scripts of all kinds, the Import/Export feature of Messenger Plus! now back-ups your entire scripts and skins settings. One less worry for you to have next time you format your computer or you want to bring your set of personal settings with you.

And finally, if you saw nothing else in the change log that motivates you to upgrade, consider this: this release integrates everything that will be needed for the Messenger Plus! 2009 Contest which will begin next week! More about that will be said soon, but those of you who’ve been using the software for some time will probably recognize the little golden icon in their contact list and the meaning of it… you’ll just have to be patient for one more week until the contest and its prizes are revealed :-).

Speaking of version 5, while I’m still working on the schematics, I thought I could make this step more interactive than I’m used to. The question I want to ask you today is: What do you think of Messenger Plus! ? Do you like it, hate it? I often read articles about the software, or even about myself, but for once, I would like my users to give me their honest, true, unfiltered opinion. It’s also a great way to share your ideas of anything you would like to see in the next major update of your Messenger add-on (although the forum is always available all year long for that purpose).

It can be a single word as well as two pages of text, in English or in French, and I promize to read it all, positive or negative, whether I get 10 answers or 10,000. Also, if you visit forums or blogs as part of your daily internet routine, don’t hesitate to talk about this and bring more people to this news post. Hopefully, this little exercise will also help make a better software and bring better support to those who need it in the future. Thank you!

Edit: big thanks for the hundreds of comments you sent me in such a short period of time. I have now removed the form as I now have enough text to read for a while :-).

If you visit the Skins and Scripts section of this site, you’ll also notice an avalanche of new products, all free, all designed to improve your Messenger experience, technically and visually. We’re still working on the new database web site, in the meantime, please take a couple of minutes to browse our pages of listings :-). This month, we’re also getting a special treat from Willz: not 1 but 4 complex skins based on the forthcoming Transformers 2 movie. The first skin, Optimus Prime, is already available for download, the next ones will be released once a week until the end of the month.

You can now enjoy sending emotion sounds again, rapidly and without worrying about errors. I can’t promise there won’t be any surprise this week while we adjust the new servers but things look very good so far. Don’t be shy and try out some new sounds from mpsounds.net to have some fun while chatting today. It’s free, as always, so think about sending sounds on Messenger instead of buying things with your Facebook points ;-). Thank you for your patience.

Despite the lack of visual changes in the software, the change log shows that many things were done under the hood. As often, scripts and skins in particular got their good share of improvements. There are now more than 500 of them in the official databases of this site. This means that you could spend the next month customizing Messenger with Plus!, its scripts and its skins and you would still haven’t seen everything. Big thanks to all the developers who keep on working on these improvements to make our daily IM life better.

In addition to the bug fixes and cosmetic improvements, this new Messenger Plus! also allows external developers to modify Messenger’s encoded windows’ files (UIB files) like they did with previous versions of Messenger. More information about that can be found in the skinning documentation. Note to all the developers reading this: Messenger Plus! is not required to be installed on your users’ computers for this feature to be used. The UIB files generated by Messenger Plus! can be read by Messenger just like the original ones which means that you can do the modifications you want on your system, encode the files and distribute the final result with your application.

Thank you for your renewed trust and support :-). Let’s have another great year together!

It’s now official, Microsoft has released the final version of Windows Live Messenger 2009 on the Live web site. That’s about time. It took more than a year of beta versions to get to this new release but it was worth the wait. Of course, it means Messenger Plus! needs a final update too and I’ve got good news: I just saved a bunch of mon… I mean, the beta version available in the Download page has been updated to support the new Messenger. The new build number is 353. Even better, Messenger Plus! Live 4.80 will officially be released before the end of the month :-).

Two reasons pushed me to refresh the public beta before doing a final release: first, the sooner the better. I know many of you were wondering what would happen with Messenger add-ons with the new Messenger and this beta it meant to be somehow reassuring. After all, everything is fully functionnal again, including emotion sounds, scripts, skins, logs, colors, event notifications, as well as the hundred of other features&options offered in the software. Secondly, I thought some developers may like to benefit from the research I had to do during the past few weeks in the windows files of Messenger; more precisely, in UIB data files.

To make a long story short, UIB files (resource type “4010″ for those who know what I’m talking about) can be entirely decoded and re-encoded by Messenger Plus! and this functionnality is offered to every other add-ons and patches that needs it. So, if you’re the developer of a program that requires to modify the windows’ files of Messenger (previously “4004″ and “4005″), download the latest version of the Skinning Documentation and read the new “Encoding and Decoding UIB” section in “Specialized Subjects”. Three pages of documentation have been written to explain how to decode and re-encode UIB files in your application in a matter of minutes.

I hope this new version of Plus! will be useful, for end-users and developers alike. If you have anything to say about the new features, have comments, suggestions, or things to talk about in general, don’t hesitate to visit the forum. Have fun with the new Messenger!