No guys I'm not dead, I am still kicking around. It has been a while since I have released anything, but things will change soonish. Last week a special public beta of Messenger Plus! Live was launched to try and ease the mass army of people going "OMG PLUS DOESN'T WORK ON 9". Which was getting to the level that the beta invite threads that kept popping up when Messenger 8 was around.

So what does this public version mean for skins? Well as far as specific details go the new protection scheme that 9 has has still not been broken. So what you see in the public beta is essentially just a band aid fix to keep the masses happy.

Now that Messenger Plus! for 9 is in most peoples hands, I have been getting a few messages and emails asking for skins for 9. Now while I have said in the past that I will not be releasing anything for beta builds, but this version of Messenger is different to other ones.

Because so much has changed on the inside it would be downright stupid of me to ignore skins until final. While I probably won't be making anything complex or ground breaking just to be safe. I will be releasing a special edited version of the default 9 skin known as Sopair.

For those of you playing at home, Sopair was the special patch that me and a few others made last month to enable patches and addons to do their thing again.

This skin will be labeled Sopair 2.0.0. Now don't expect anything too flashy, since I haven't really spent too much time on it. Since this will be a beta skin in itself you can expect a few weird things on occasion. The other thing is it will only come in English since well I'd rather spend the energy on properly planning out other skins. This is sort of a proof of concept to show that the ideas are still flowing and well to have some base ready when I do actually start more serious skins.

So what can you expect in Sopair? Well as per usual you will have the standard button removal settings as well as a few transformation settings that will allow you to bring back the 8.5 look (more or less). This includes transforming the dashboard back to 8.5 style, moving the display pictures back to the right in the chat window and moving toolbar in the chat window back into the place where they were in the chat window.

On top of these settings there will be minor enhancements to the Messenger user interface. One of the more noticeable changes is that I have changed the look of alerts to match Windows Live Messenger 9 a bit better as well as modifying the sign in window to try and match the version of Messenger briefly shown at PDC.

When is this skin going to launch? Well its in its final testing phase at the moment and for once I do have a testing team. If it works out I might keep that going. But yeah I have sent the skin to the database so it could be up any day now.

At any rate keep your eyes on this news page, because I will post about it once I have released things.

Willz.

Keep doing well mate... I will follow you in this adventure (in my free time, wich will be more in a few weeks)...

thankz

Keep it up. I haven't been active at all lately, I haven't talked to you in ages, and it was only a brief conversation. I like to keep updated but I've got a lot going on. I'll definitely want to see some more from you, though I luckily did get to see things others did not .

Messenger Stuff Forums

when you wrote this post 4 days ago you said that this skin has been submitted to the database yet 4 days on and its still not in the database yet? wheres menthix gone?

Quick suggestion for the next update for Sopair: Reducing the padding on the sides of the conversation window, as it is taking up quite a bit of space.