Getting the Message through Instantly

Like most people I have my favourite instant messenger program. My personal IM of choice on windows is Live messenger (latest version is 8 available from http://ideas.live.com). When I moved over to the Mac, i was very disappointed to discover that the latest version of live messenger for OS X seemed to be 2+ years behind the PC version.

There is a Jabber "work-around" that allows you to use the inbuilt Mac messenger iChat, which works very well but is a bit of a cludge. If using iChat with MSN (Live Messenger) is important to you, full instructions on how to configure it can be found here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I10d-9SWmh4

Thankfully (for me at least), the Microsoft programmers have been hard at work, and now have a beta version of Live Messenger version 8 which you can download from here. This is a beta, so there are things that either aren't there at all (that hopefully will be, such as offline messages), as well as somethings that aren't working correctly all of the time (video and voice calls are apparently a little buggy, but havent been a problem for me). All of that said, even with these limitations it is a better solution than the old version.