03-18-2008, 08:55 PM
One of the things the constantly annoys me about Windows Live Messenger is the fact that it contains a whole bunch of resources that are extremely outdated. Now while I give Microsoft credit for trying to bring this up to scratch in Windows Live Messenger 8.5 and 9.0 there is still a lot of room for improvement.
The majority of Microsoft products have moved on to a stage where their UI's have been revised and new graphics have been created for them. For Windows Live Messenger this is sadly not the case.
How so? Well if you are skinner you will know all too well how badly Windows Live Messenger needs a revamp in graphic resources.
For starters. The taskbar icons in Windows Live Messenger use the old school 256 color bitmap images which mask out the color magenta. Now while this was a pretty accepted technique in say Windows 98, for gods sake Windows Live Messenger is only supposed to work from Windows XP and beyond. If you are XP user chances are you have a setup that can display icons with proper anti-aliasing. Why Microsoft haven't made all their taskbar icons in .ico format is beyond me.
Heres another one that proves how lazy the team is:
The image above is the image shown to automatically share backgrounds in Windows Live Messenger. Notice something weird about the image? Yes thats right they haven't even bothered to take a simple screen shot of Windows Live Messenger and replace the existing aged MSN Messenger screen shot. I ask how long can it seriously take to update this stuff? We are at Windows Live Messenger 8.5 and still they chose to keep resources from the 7.0 era.
The last thing on my list is the emoticons. Ok sure they are good looking but when you look at them they are horribly aliased and some really do need to be updated. Now while you may argue that the animated emoticons have to be gif format that is not the case. Animated emoticons in Windows Live Messenger are in png format so you can have the proper anti-aliasing if you really want to.
To prove my point, in Windows Aero Messenger I have yet again updated their emoticons to something more modern. But this time to really make it obvious that they need to get their act together, I have tried to stick as close to the original emoticons as possible.
Here is a side by side comparison:
Windows Live Messenger Emoticons ©Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved.
Willz's Emoticons. ©Will "Willz" Ingles 2008
Now I'm not saying mine are better or anything, but you can see the effect that anti-aliasing has on the emoticons themselves. Plus I also made the emoticons a bit more vibrant as a bonus and of course like the majority of my work I designed them in Adobe Illustrator so they are fully scalable.
Anyway hopefully this will serve as insight as to what needs to be done in future releases of Windows Live Messenger. Lucky for you guys my skins will try to remove the majority of these oddities.
Willz.
The majority of Microsoft products have moved on to a stage where their UI's have been revised and new graphics have been created for them. For Windows Live Messenger this is sadly not the case.
How so? Well if you are skinner you will know all too well how badly Windows Live Messenger needs a revamp in graphic resources.
For starters. The taskbar icons in Windows Live Messenger use the old school 256 color bitmap images which mask out the color magenta. Now while this was a pretty accepted technique in say Windows 98, for gods sake Windows Live Messenger is only supposed to work from Windows XP and beyond. If you are XP user chances are you have a setup that can display icons with proper anti-aliasing. Why Microsoft haven't made all their taskbar icons in .ico format is beyond me.
Heres another one that proves how lazy the team is:
The image above is the image shown to automatically share backgrounds in Windows Live Messenger. Notice something weird about the image? Yes thats right they haven't even bothered to take a simple screen shot of Windows Live Messenger and replace the existing aged MSN Messenger screen shot. I ask how long can it seriously take to update this stuff? We are at Windows Live Messenger 8.5 and still they chose to keep resources from the 7.0 era.
The last thing on my list is the emoticons. Ok sure they are good looking but when you look at them they are horribly aliased and some really do need to be updated. Now while you may argue that the animated emoticons have to be gif format that is not the case. Animated emoticons in Windows Live Messenger are in png format so you can have the proper anti-aliasing if you really want to.
To prove my point, in Windows Aero Messenger I have yet again updated their emoticons to something more modern. But this time to really make it obvious that they need to get their act together, I have tried to stick as close to the original emoticons as possible.
Here is a side by side comparison:
Windows Live Messenger Emoticons ©Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved.
Willz's Emoticons. ©Will "Willz" Ingles 2008
Now I'm not saying mine are better or anything, but you can see the effect that anti-aliasing has on the emoticons themselves. Plus I also made the emoticons a bit more vibrant as a bonus and of course like the majority of my work I designed them in Adobe Illustrator so they are fully scalable.
Anyway hopefully this will serve as insight as to what needs to be done in future releases of Windows Live Messenger. Lucky for you guys my skins will try to remove the majority of these oddities.
Willz.
.