Vanilla Mist

If these rumors are true, then more people will finally migrate to Yahoo Messenger. I think it’s great!!! I can’t wait!! Why people insist in using MSN Messenger is a mystery to me. I hate the damn thing. For many different reasons, some of which I mentioned in an interview I gave last week to one of the big newspapers in Brasil. Yes, that’s how much I prefer Yahoo Messenger, I am so well known for liking it that I even got interviewd about it.

But honestly, why do people use MSN Messenger? It’s too big and takes a lot of space on screen, it doesn’t allow different status(es?) to different contacts, doesn’t send offline messages or even when you’re under invisible mode, the contact list is cluttered, not even the smilies are half expressive as Yahoo’s – and I could go on and on with reasons for people not to use MSN Messenger, but still it seems like everyone and their brothers use it. And I can’t convince many people to try using Yahoo, so if the above is true and Skype and Yahoo merge into one, I will be a very happy gal.

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The new Yahoo Messenger Beta is now available, with better support for voice chat, making it a serious competitor to Skype. It also integrates well with Yahoo 360. Other cool features:

• it now acts as an answering machine / voice mail: if you make a call and the person is not there, you can leave a voice message.
• drag and drop pictures into your IM window to share them.

Go here for a full list of features and grab your copy.

[update]: I have just tried the voice chat and I don’t think it’s that good. Skype is still much much better. But Yahoo beta is, well, still in beta, so maybe we can expect some improvements? Let’s see…

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I’m the kind of person who learns by experience. Don’t tell me how to do something, show me how to do it. Show me an example. I find it much easier to understand things this way.

Bringing this to the context of the web and computers, everytime I’m looking for a software or a script, the first thing I look for is a screenshot or an online demo, respectively. Only after I’ve seen this is that I go read the features list, just to make sure specific features are available, in case I haven’t recognized them in the screenshot, for example. Of course, in this case, a visual aid or a demo experiece will also tell me a lot about the overall quality of the program or script. Unless something is well referred to me, I hardly ever download something I can’t see at least a screenshot of.

But anyway, I was just rambling. Actually I started this post for a different reason. Right now I’m looking for a good compression/extraction utility, link Winzip. To my surprise, I was completely unaware of the fact that Winzip is shareware. I’ve used it since God knows when, but it always came with the computer, I never actually downloaded it. Still, I seem to have been under the impression that it was free software. Well, it’s not. So I need something else. I then came across many other options, among which 2 seem to be the best ones around: FlipZip and ZipGenius. They are both well rated at many download sites and now I can’t decide on which to use.

Which compression/extraction utility do you use? Have you ever used any of these two? Please, give me some opinions!

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