A Look at Yahoo's Vista Messenger
Late last week I got on the phone with Matthew Skyrm and Joshua Jacobson of Yahoo for a demo of the new Vista optimized Yahoo messenger that will be unveiled at CES. Overall we are impressed with the product from a design and user interface point of view, although there are no feature additions of note.
The new messenger has taken advantage of Vista’s new Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) application development framework, which further disassociates engineering and design teams by allowing designers to markup UIs using XAML. As an added advantages, it’s vector based, so pretty pictures will stay pretty as monitors get better.
Yahoo! shows off this new flexibility through a few new user customizations. Some of the small tweaks have been incorporating the chat functionality into tabs, staking out a spot for YM on the Vista widget tray, and automatically adding groups of friends you make on the Yahoo! network to you Messenger.
For better quality photos and a video preview, check out Yahoo!’s product page.
This early look at what developers can do with WPF’s disassociation between design and behavior, following the trends we’ve seen on the web, gives me high expectations for future apps and should make a lot of developer’s lives easier.