Filed under: Software
Microsoft on Messenger for the Mac: it ain't dead!
Our good friends in Redmond dropped us a note concerning Messenger for the Mac's future (based on this post). The Mac BU wants all Mac users to rest assured that Messenger for the Mac 6.0 will be included with Microsoft Office 2008 for the Mac. Not only is Messenger for the Mac 6.0 alive and well, the Mac BU's crack team of coders are hard at work on Messenger for Mac 7.0 which will have long awaited audio/video capabilities (and which is soon to be released into the hands of some lucky enterprise beta participants, mostly to test out the Office Communication Server 2007 integration).This is welcome news to me because I use Messenger for the Mac everyday at my day job. I couldn't do my work without it (and who wants to run a VM for an IM client? Not this guy).
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Stan-O said 10:17PM on 11-07-2007
Why Messenger for Mac, why not Adium? Are there any features available in Messenger which aren't there yet in Adium?
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Farid said 10:19PM on 11-07-2007
Adium recently announced work in progress for a/v support for MSN. My bet is on them releasing that functionality first :P
I'd love to see where they go with messenger for mac but it would have to get a lot better before I'd consider using it.
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Emmanuel said 10:20PM on 11-07-2007
'Tis only a flesh wound. It don't want to go on the cart...
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lyndon said 10:29PM on 11-07-2007
I will stick to Adium since I use MSN ICQ Google and Bonjour all at the same time in one client with tabbed chat windows. I very rarely use voice or video chat and when I do I use Skype. I am sure that the Mesenger guys wil make serious head way but I know there are a lot of people out there who will stick to adium or even iChat
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AJ said 11:42PM on 11-07-2007
Maybe I'm beating the dead horse senseless, but why would anybody run any Microsoft software at all on a Mac? Adium is better at MSN Messenging than MSN Messenger is, iWork replaces Office and then some, Parallels and Fusion are better than VirtualPC, Flip4Mac handles anything we'd need WMPlayer for and Safari and Firefox are better than IE.
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Johnm said 12:17AM on 11-08-2007
My guess is that it would be for non-power users (which Mac targets) that just want to talk to the countless millions upon millions of MSN users. They probably aren't aware of Adium - I wasn't until this thread!
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Howie Isaacks said 12:27AM on 11-08-2007
Big deal! I don't give a crap about microsloth's crappy messenger app anyway.
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Greg said 1:11AM on 11-08-2007
Cerulean Studios is working on Trillian Astra for OS X. It'll be interesting to see how it compares to Adium. The Windows version is good, given it's early stage of development.
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Winona So said 1:20AM on 11-08-2007
" Are there any features available in Messenger which aren't there yet in Adium?"
for me, yes. When i use messenger, I /must/ be able to have at least two lines in my text, in one message. In adium, you can't do that. The only third party messenger that can do that is aMsn, and that isn't a very good one, so I stick to using Messenger for Mac.
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Alice said 1:40AM on 11-08-2007
I actually appreciate they are going to have a new version. I quite like it. :) (and yes, i tried Adium before, and mercury messenger. But I like this app)
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chatelp said 1:57AM on 11-08-2007
@Winona So : try shift-return to enter a new line and not sending the message...
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d.s.pedersen said 2:07AM on 11-08-2007
As far as I know one can't add separate emoticons in Adium, which is possible in the Messenger. Adium might be cool for the feature freak but I don't need all those superfluous tweaks and dingsbums they've incorporated into Adium. Also, Messenger can easily be 'fine tuned' to get rid of those ugly Live Windows Messenger logos, which can be replaced with subtle grey Apple logos.
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Huggins said 3:24AM on 11-08-2007
@ Winona
In Adium you can do multiple lines by going into the Preferences, under the "General" tab and setting "Send Messages With:" to either "return" or "enter". Whichever key is not selected as the send message button will function as normal (meaning that it'll give you line breaks).
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Huggins said 3:29AM on 11-08-2007
@ d.s.pederson
Not to proclaim Adium as the greatest thing in life, but, you can find a plethora of emoticons, including Messenger's on emoticons, on the Adium website:
http://www.adiumxtras.com/index.php?a=search&cat_id=2
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Mr Lizard said 3:36AM on 11-08-2007
@ AJ:
"iWork replaces Office and then some"
Well, it might for some, but iWork is a long way from replicating Word and Excel. IMHO, the only app in iWork that improves over it's Office counterpart is Keynote.
"Parallels and Fusion are better than VirtualPC"
Probably not a fair comparison, as VirtualPC is not compatible with any Intel Mac, and is now legacy software.
Besides, Parallels and Fusion *do* let you run Microsoft software on your Mac- they let you run Windows!
"Flip4Mac handles anything we'd need WMPlayer for"
Again, WMP is legacy software and no longer available from Microsoft, so there isn't really a 'rival' product offered by MS for Flip4Map. In fact, MS promotes F4M on its own website.
"Safari and Firefox are better than IE"
IE hasn't been available for the Mac for years!!
I think the only real point in your post is Office- for some, i.e. non-power users, iWork works just fine. It's not fully compatible with Office however- certain documents won't appear as they do in Word/Powerpoint etc.
And Number's approach to spreadsheets is completely different to that of Excel, which can be confusing to long time Excel users.
Just because it's got Microsoft written on it doesn't mean the software is bad!
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Dan said 4:18AM on 11-08-2007
@ Huggins:
I know that, but you have to add them as packages, right? I like to be able to add just the few, cool ones that other people send to me. Ultimately, Adium doesn't include any features that makes it superior to Messenger in what its supposed to do: Chatting. Though Adium is seemingly infinite tweakable the very simple feat of Messenger, adding separate emoticons, is what makes Messenger the better choice in my (limited) world :-)
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metatext said 4:33AM on 11-08-2007
I use MSN in iChat, through a Jabber transport. This gives me one system-wide list of contacts in the form of Address Book cards. Their (slightly altered - contact%email@jabberserver) MSN address becomes just another field on their card. This way, not only do I get to use the clutter-free iChat interface for all my IM (except for Skype), I can also quickly look up past conversations with Spotlight (and see their online status in Mail).
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Bryan Bortz said 8:18AM on 11-08-2007
so, for you to do your job everyday, and not use VM stuff for it. You need to be able to pick single emoticons and place them in your client? ok.
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ChillyWilly said 10:39AM on 11-08-2007
Say want you want about MS software, there's something about the MSN Messenger that works for me vs. the other ways of getting MSN chat functionality.
I just recently did the iChat/Jabber/Psi integration and while it's kind of cool in some ways, it's very disorganized in many others (no easy grouping, adds a new entry into Address Book for each client, impossible to clean up users you've blocked). I know it's a work around, but it would be nice to have some organization.
Haven't tried Adium yet, so can't say how that works for multiple clients. Assuming it works pretty well, so I may try it here sometime.
Although before long, we'll have multiple multiple-IM programs installed, vying for your usage.
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Cameron Williams said 12:21PM on 11-08-2007
If they're calling it 7.0, does that mean this will still be missing features like offline messaging and roaming identity will still be missing?
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