I got update notification when fired up Yahoo! Messenger yesterday, and instantly get excited with the word “Now with voice !!”… True, when it came out as beta for quite a while and wearing “3.0″ on it’s back, I can not say that it’s an inferior product compared to it’s Win version sibling. In fact, it has far much better look and feel despite of many lack of features yet to be implemented.

I’m not a believer of one application does it all, but more on “do one thing , do it good” side, but for Yahoo! Messenger I kinda put my expectation a bit diversed. And the latest update really does excite me. It can do voice, so i can voice chat with my overseas friends without having to switch to other software, although Skype still a champion here, but I think it will be nice if software that I use nearly all the time to connect to my friends can also do voice call once in a while. It can save transcript into message archive, a good feature for business and long time feature on Win Y!M. And many other thing, that makes me thing that Y!M Mac developer team really know how to prioritize. I couldn’t care less about audibles or changeable smiley sets, so I missed nothing in that area.

One thing that bothers me is Sending SMS to mobile number. Okay, it is a text message to mobile, but WHY the hell the UI have to resemble cellphone keypad ? I know it only for phone number entry, but I see no reason to play cute here, even on a Mac. It’s a desktop PC, no space limitation, no keyboard limitation. What make it worst is that it was not intuitive at all. I click Send sms, a big icon on top of a chat window, then pops up that clumsy little mobile phone keypad… what the hell is that ? do i type the message there, or do i enter number there ? Why not just pop a dialog asking enter recipient mobile number , then go back to chat window. Sigh.. Not sure where or what is wrong, maybe it’s just me, or maybe the UI design team are wacky enough to create such annoyance inside a great sofware… Come on, Kai Krause’s concept never really took off, why trying too hard to catch with it… Once again.. Sigh…