Windows Live Messenger Alternative

Technology
1

Hello Everyone!
I have been an MSN/WLM Messenger user for 15 years, and when MS took our beloved messenger from us, I was sooo disappointed, angry, sad and many other things. I felt like they broke into my house to steal my property. When I found messenger reviver, I was very happy, because I could use my favorite IM again. Thanks Jonathan for that! But I felt it won’t last long because MS tried everything to make us unhappy.
These days Messenger 2009 stopped working, and even when it worked, it gave us many problems. I didn’t get the half of the messages from my contacts, it suddenly signed out and didn’t connect back, emoticons didn’t appear, file transfer didn’t start, and so on. I tried version 2012 but I didn’t like it at all, so I decided to look for a messenger similar to the great wlm messenger, although I knew I won’t find anything that would look and function like our messenger. I didn’t find anything; all of the options were ugly, and boring. So I started to look for something I can totally edit, so it can look at least a little bit similar to msn.

I just wanted to share what I found and what I did with it, because it really looks similar to the old messenger (skinned) and it has every option messenger had (except the messenger plus abilities, but we can edit almost everything in this program in css, tmpl and cfg) It has many great other functions, you can choose between 11 themes, you’ll find audio and video call, screen sharing, really fast file transfer, sending screenshot, create chat rooms and conferences, view history, send nudge, change font style, font size (I think we can change font color too, but I didn’t find yet where to edit it), whiteboard option (you can draw anything you want with your chat mate). You can also copy your favorite animated emoticons there. I changed even the sounds, so it has the old messenger sounds. There is no annoying ads, and the great thing, that the conversation is encrypted
Here is a link; you can see how it looks like after some editing and designing:

Messenger with my old wlm background. :smile:

This messenger is totally free (there is an enterprise version as well, but we don’t need it), and we don’t even need to install it if we don’t want, because it has a portable version also.

If Jonathan could do anything to bring messenger 2009 back, it would be great, but in the meantime try this great piece. If you don’t like the basic themes, you can add your own background, so it will look like your beloved messenger. :slight_smile: I can bravely say that after using this messenger, I don’t miss the other one, because I feel like I’m using an updated version of WLM. :slight_smile:

2

Interesting, I think your background might be just a little too pink for me personally :yum:
I don’t think I’ve actually heard of this client/service before, the featureset is pretty impressive though.

One thing I’m curious about is how you convince your contacts to use an alternative like this. A good number of my contacts simply “had enough” after 2009 was not available and since they already were using alternatives like Google Hangouts (which is a fairly good product, but lacking on the desktop) or Facebook Chat, they probably would not have any interest in trying something like this, no matter what it was made to look like. Mind you, none of them went to Skype :wink:

Just one quick note that I think you touched on briefly, you can actually skin Live Messenger 2012 in similar ways with the ‘Skin Designer’ in Messenger Plus 6. I haven’t seen anyone yet come up with a full 2009-ish skin yet however. (A skinning example with Plus).

3

Thank you for your reply Jonathan. Of course my background is too pink for you because you are a guy. :smile: This is my favorite background, but we can change and edit this messenger to look like the way we want.
I think every option is changeable there, the only thing I didn’t find yet is the font color. (I think you could find it, because you are a genius) :slight_smile: Anything else can be modified. It wasn’t hard to convince my contact after some editing so it looked the way THEY wanted. :smile:
I know wlm 2012 can be skinned, but I just didn’t like overall outlook and the main window was half white. The wlm was dying all the time, I received only the half of the messages, which was funny at first (For example I wrote about my relatives coming to visit me, and the answer was “idiots”, and I didn’t know why my contact wrote that, but later it appeared that was for another subject, and the first part of the message didn’t reach me) but later annoying along with the “please verify your email address” message. My contacts were online but I saw them offline, it disconnected every other time, and many other problems appeared lately :frowning: so I wanted to use something reliable, colorful, and wlm like.
I really loved wlm 2009, I missed it so much, and if you could bring it back, would be great, but I’m happy with this new one, it has everything I loved in the old one, including the sounds, even the program icon looks like the messenger one now. :smile: The animated emoticons are much bigger here, and the whiteboard option is great. I just wanted to share this, because I saw how many people are sad like I was before I found this great piece.

4

It’s kinda funny you can’t change the text colour, considering there’s every other option in there (including spell checking, which finally showed up in Skype recently).

Anyway I managed to change the text colour, for the box where you write your own text, you just add

QTextEdit
{
color:#FF00FF;   // pink text colour in typing area of conversation window
}

to the style.css.

And then for the receiving and sending text, editing the chat_template.tmpl and adding color to the style tag in the following line in both the [received] and [sent] categories:

<td class="[class_name]" align="left" valign="top" colspan="2" style="padding-left:10px; padding-bottom:16px;">[message]</td>

becomes:

<td class="[class_name]" align="left" valign="top" colspan="2" style="padding-left:10px; padding-bottom:16px;color:#FF00FF;">[message]</td>

This is based on the blue-black theme, I’ll let you figure out the rest :yum:

I’m pleased you were able to find an option that works for you, nice work :grinning:

With regards to the connection problems you reported from 2012, these aren’t specific to 2012 itself, but more the fact that it needs to communicate to the Messenger server over https (effectively, a web page, reloaded over and over).

If your contacts or yourself don’t have reliable connectivity, other network problems or a weird setup, for example if you regularly don’t see pages load properly or have to try several times to get to a site before it will load, these types of situations will cause exactly the issues you mentioned. It’s even worse right now since offline messaging no longer works, and there’s no buffer when you’re connected. Hypothetically if 2009 were to be made to work again, it would probably be done so over this same https method and therefore would have similar problems (although I admit there could be other slightly more crazy options).

Also, glad to hear your relatives aren’t actually idiots :wink:

1 Like
5

Dear Jonathan,

Thanks a lot for your help, I knew I would have to put some code in that line but I didn’t know where and what exactly, but now everything is great, thanks to you! :slight_smile: I managed to see a blue text while typing, but it appeared black when I clicked on send.
The Brosix guys said that they removed the text color option, because when someone was typing in blue for example and some of their contacts had a blue background, they didn’t see a thing, so they thought removing the font color option will solve that problem.
My internet connection is reliable and fast, I never have such problems you mentioned. I could install and use wlm 2012 but my contacts couldn’t, so it wouldn’t be fun to use it without contacts. :smile:
And I love this new messenger because I don’t depend on Microsoft’s mood anymore, plus I always felt they are spying on me. :smile:
Oh, there is another little thing I wanted to change, but I don’t know if it’s possible. I want to make the typing box a little bit larger, can we do that? Please check it out and let me know if that is possible. In WLM we can drag the separator line to move it up or down, but there is no such an option here.

6

Does this Brosix support custom emoticons? I’m not particular about handwriting (nice to have but unnecessary). My main requirements for a new IM client really lie in custom emoticons and at least some level of security, as well as something similar to MSN’s picture-sharing feature.

It’d be interesting if Jonathan could eventually work on a new client that perhaps doesn’t use the MSNP, or if there was some community-made project. I’m surprised there’s no open-source or community-developed IM-client out there already.

Of course I’d prefer to just stick with 2009 since I have a nice skin on it and it’s full of my existing emoticons, so…

7

I was looking for an open-source IM as well, because I didn’t find any good looking one. The Brosix IM supports custom emotions, you can edit everything in the css, cfg and tmpl file, and you can put your favorite animated emoticons, your favorite background and everything else can be changed. The conversations are encrypted, and there is a file sharing and screen sharing option as well. I was addicted to wlm 2009 but since I use this one, I don’t miss it anymore.
And because you can edit everything in Brosix, you will feel that it is your own messenger. :smile: Well, I feel that way. :slight_smile:

8

I must say there are indeed open source IMs around, two notable ones I found were Emesene and aMSN, however their projects mostly died when MS killed Messenger service and since I think MS is keeping skype protocol a secret (of course, they know the community could kill them off easily making something better which is a no no for them) no one is bothering updating to code or trying anything new… I guess coding a private IM server is no easy task either.

What I found quite annoying though is right now its the chance for companies like Yahoo or Google to take advantage of the outrage MS, did with WLM and do something, but Yahoo I don’t know whats up with them, and Google is too busy fighting their phone war with MS and Apple, the main problem with skype is MS has right now like zero competition forcing them to care, have anyone seen skype forums? full of complains and suggestions MS has been ignoring for months.

But going back on the main topic it is a nice find but may I ask what protocol it uses? do we have to create new accounts? it looks nice but it would surely need a lot of facial work up to make it look more like WLM, still possible though.

9

emmm i can sign in into brosix with my outlook account? :wink: