Messaging applications
I’ve been fooling around with messaging applications these last couple of days. The first thing I’ve noticed is how little has changed with basic email and IM programs in the last 10 years. The basic email UI hasn’t evolved much since the addition of the preview pane, and the IM contacts list basically hasn’t evolved since the addition of avatars.
Nevertheless, incremental improvements to native applications have made it worthwhile to upgrade: currently running on my Windows desktop are the latest beta of Windows Live Mail (as Mossberg has pointed out, it’s a worthy successor to OE) and a relatively obscure Jabber IM client called Pandion. The Jabber/XMPP world appears to have been energized by Google’s selection of XMPP for Google Talk, and there are now a stack of servers that support back-end interoperability with AIM, Yahoo and MSN - so that I need not run any of those protocols natively on my PC (if I were inclined to do so, the latest version of Pidgin is also a worthy contender for a universal IM client).
Yes, I tried going 100% web/ajax clients (gmail, meebo) for a while, but I got tired of them - for constantly-used communications clients they just don’t cut it for me.
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