An Apple a day…

I sat down with Matthew Skyrm, Senior Director of Product Management for Messenger. Alongside his duties running the Windows clients, he’s also the head honcho for the Mac version. I gave him my best “Puss-‘n-Boot” eyes and said “Matthew, the Mac natives are restless and I need some Mac material, news, anything.” OK, it didn’t go down like that – it was less dramatic and took place in a windowless conference room. But I did get some good info from him and our first Messenger for Mac post is here . There’s a little something for everyone – a couple of tips and some news about the next Beta…

First the tips… I asked Matthew about his favorite gems in the Mac version. Without hesitation, he started explaining the Command + N keyboard shortcut. When you hit this while you’re in Messenger for Mac, a contact search box appears and you can type in any part of a contact’s name to quickly find them and IM. While there’s also a Message button at the bottom of the Messenger List window, this lets you keyboard lovers run at full speed.

“Ok, that’s a good timesaver but what else you got?” This next one was cool – I had seen it before but since I spend my days on a PC, I hadn’t made use of it. There’s a feature built into the Mac version that lets you create a display image using your webcam. Use your built-in iSight camera or any other webcam that’s connected. Suddenly imitating emoticons with my face and sticking them into my display image became very entertaining… To access this, go into Preferences and click on Display Image.

Matthew also showed me some deeper personalization you can do in the Mac version around friend alerts. You can assign different alert behaviors and even sounds for different friends. So if you have a special friend and you always want to know when he or she comes online, you can tell Messenger for Mac to play a custom sound (choose one or upload your own) and even bounce the Messenger dock icon.

“Yeah, yeah, great Sarah. What about the next Beta?” Isn’t it amazing how I can read your thoughts? . While Matthew doesn’t yet have a firm date for the next release, he did confirm a couple of the new features that will be in it. As we mentioned in an earlier post, chat rooms will make their debut in the next Beta. The new version will also offer tabbed conversations (woo hoo!). Plus, conversation archiving will be available and will be searchable from Spotlight. So the next time you can’t recall whether your friend sent you their phone number over IM or email, you can just run a Spotlight search to quickly find out.

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