Yahoo Messenger for Vista - WPF Goodness!

Hello,

I haven't seen this posted here, so just thought I would drop you a link for some screenshots from the forthcoming Vista version of Yahoo Messenger. As you can see, it looks pretty gorgeous.

I think this is the first commerical WPF application, beating even Microsoft to it (if you exclude their WPF development environment, that is...)

http://thewpfblog.com/?p=76

I like some aspects of it, i.e. the fact it fits in with the GUI of Windows Vista; but I don't especially like the avatars used, as it is unlikely that people would use ones like those shown, and the cutting out of the background of the person shown (the person whose hair is over-lapping the desktop) would not work as well I suspect. Thanks for the link.

Angus Higgins

Nice, I love the color picker. I'd love to see that in action.

Cool, that looks like one hell of an improvement from the current Y! messenger.

Wow. That is awesome

very cool. Can't wait until Vista is released and the NDAs around the world will be no more!

Awesome!  I hope we see lots of WPF apps in the future.
But does it still make the annoying sounds?

We just got a demo of it up on Channel 10.  Very cool, I want to use it

Check it out here: http://on10.net/Blogs/larry/yahoo-messenger-on-wpf/

This is the sign of things coming. Gorgeous graphics—if you can afford a good UI designer—but you can forget about UI consistency. Microsoft never managed to enforce it, even for their own software, and now that everyone and their dog will be able to write a huge ugly semi-transparent CD ejector application, it will become even worse. And the worst of all, Windows users won't care much. They are used to ugly interfaces, after all, starting with Windows itself. Sigh.

That's a nice well thought out response there.

Consistency is just one way of making a usable program, and it's had its day for the most part. Sticking to one design paradigm even if it's hit its limits isn't a way to make a program usable. It's just a way of excusing the fact you haven't bothered to find a better way.

And if you can't afford to design a program to be usable, then you'll suffer anyway, now it should be easier to design a usable program. And since when should Microsoft "enforce" consistency. I'd be pretty peeved if another company was dictating terms to me.

I'm looking forward to the best designed apps getting better, and the worst getting lost.

Massif wrote:

And since when should Microsoft "enforce" consistency. I'd be pretty peeved if another company was dictating terms to me.

Well they do publish UI guidelines, don't they? What for, may I ask? Surely not for themselves!

Apple also has UI guidelines (much better thought out, BTW). The difference is that non-conforming Mac applications don't sell.

 

<pirate voice>They be more what you'd call guidelines than actual rules.</pirate voice>