Thanks!

Melissa Daniels
Yahoo! Messenger Community Manager

A couple of versions ago, we included a new option for the format of your IM messages in the conversation window. In addition to the usual default style that has the colored bar across each speech bubble, you can also choose an alternate simplestyle for your window.

To change between message format styles, just go to the Messenger menu, choose Preferences, and click the “Messaging” icon. You’ll see a drop-down menu for Conversation style. There is also a similar menu for conference window formatting right below it.

In the future, we hope to make the message format platform open, which would allow users to come up with new themes on their own. One of our designers, Brian Kobashikawa, used WebKit CSS3 to develop another style he named “Kobi Lite”. While this one isn’t available to the public, we hope to offer our additional formats and possibly those made by others users in the future.

On another note, we launched a brand new Yahoo! Messenger website this week. Same URL and products, just a new look and feel including a feature comparison chart across versions, and a new import contacts wizard that lets you add or invite friends to Yahoo! Messenger from your Yahoo! Address Book as well as other email services like Gmail, Hotmail, AOL and many more.

Sarah Bacon
Product Manager

With this new version, you can make free PC-to-PC calls or sign up for a Phone Out account to make calls from your Mac to regular or mobile phones worldwide for as low as 1¢ a minute (see rates). And if you want friends to be able to call you on your Mac from any phone, sign up for a Phone In account and choose a number.

Download Yahoo! Messenger for Mac Beta

Now that our Mac version has voice, users can also enjoy two other handy features: free voicemail and call forwarding. If you’re away from your Mac or signed out of Yahoo! Messenger, friends can leave you a voicemail which is then delivered as an email attachment to an address of your choice.

If you want to make sure you don’t miss any calls, use the call forwarding feature to immediately send incoming calls to any regular or mobile phone number. Note that you do need a Phone Out account to use call forwarding.

There is also a new Voice & Calls section in the preferences menu. From there you can set what email address should receive your voicemails, what number your calls should get forwarded to, and handy things like whether or not you want iTunes to pause when a call comes in.

You’ll find the voice features in a new “Voice & SMS” button in your IM window. From there you can start a call, or send a free SMS (text) message to a friend’s mobile phone (note that your friend may be charged for receiving your SMS message depending on their mobile phone data plan).

The main contact list window also has a button near the bottom that opens up a dial pad. This is handy if you have a number you need to call that’s not associated with a contact.

Check out this short screencast to see how the new voice features work:

If you’re curious about the voice features but aren’t ready to sign up for a Phone Out account (or don’t have a friend you can call for free on PC-to-PC), try the “Make a free test call” button in the Voice preferences menu. During the free call you can record and playback your voice to check out the quality.

We really want your feedback on this new version, so after you’ve had some time to try it, please visit our feedback page to let us know what you like and don’t like.

On your mark, get set…start talking!

Sarah Bacon
Product Manager

And as Mr. Jobs says, “One more thing…” - we are working hard to add voice capabilities to our next release. Stay tuned for more updates.

Sarah Bacon
Product Manager

There are no new features in this update but we fixed a couple of crash issues, including an update to the crash reporting for Leopard users.

We also made improvements to the sign in process when you’re behind a firewall. So if you’ve had issues in the past with signing in from the office or elsewhere with a firewall, please try installing this new update.

Download Yahoo! Messenger for Mac 3.0 beta 2

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone!

Sarah Bacon
Product Manager

- Improved stability and compatibility with Mac OS X Version 10.5 (Leopard)
- Some small interface improvements, including a new Show/Hide Display Images button in the IM and chat room windows
- Improved chat room layout, with the list of chatters in a left hand, scrollable panel with age/sex/location details available on hover (if the user is sharing his/her profile)

Download Yahoo! Messenger for Mac 3.0 Beta 2

Just a heads up that we’ll be upgrading the Yahoo! Messenger chat rooms this afternoon (approx. 2-5pm PST). As it’s taking place, you may encounter some instability when entering or using the chat rooms. We appreciate your patience while we complete the upgrade.

Once the upgrade is complete, you should find that the room lobby counts are more accurate and that the voice spammers you may have encountered at the launch of Captcha are no longer prevalent. In addition, we’re also introducing some changes to make Captcha more friendly for the visually impaired.

And thanks to everyone for your feedback on the new Yahoo! Messenger for Mac 3.0 Beta 2 (rock on Adam!). The team is already plugging away on the next release to address some of the bugs and to add improvements to areas like the chat rooms. We’ll keep you posted!

Sarah Bacon
Product Manager

We know our Mac users have been waiting patiently for a new version of Yahoo! Messenger for Mac. The wait is finally over. Please give a warm welcome to the new Yahoo! Messenger for Mac 3.0 Beta 2. Download it now.

This new version includes:

Tabbed IM windows: When you have two or more conversations going on, they appear as separate tabs in a single window. Less clutter for your desktop! Plus, you can drag a tab out and make it into its own window (or drag it back in to consolidate). Tabbed conversations are a preference, so if you prefer having one window per IM conversation, you still can.

Chat rooms: Yup, the same Yahoo! chat rooms that Windows users have been using are now open to Mac users.

Message archiving: All of your IM and chat room conversations can now be archived on your computer.

Improved stability for webcam and file transfer: There were issues with these in the past version so the team did a lot of bug fixes and under-the-hood work to improve them.

More emoticons: We added in the additional emoticons that are in our other versions of Messenger, so Mac users now have them all!

Download Yahoo! Messenger for Mac 3.0 Beta 2

Note that this new Beta 2 version only works on Mac OSX 10.4 or later. In order to get this out sooner, we had to make a choice about which version of OSX to support. And thanks to your votes here on the blog, we had a better idea of which direction to take.

We hope you enjoy this new version!

Sarah Bacon
Product Manager

Thanks,

Sarah Bacon
Product Manager

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