Thursday, April 13, 2006

New improved Gtalk

Google Talk seemed to be a simple chat software without the extra frills, but we overlooked the beta tag to the software, and the latest installment has the feel of your standard resplendent IM client. There are many preset avatars available, you can also use your own picture, or if you want to hang onto your yahoo! avatar, printscreen it and use it here. The view feature allows you to sort the contacts in the window in various convinient ways. The standard one throws up the most mailed contacts, but there is an option to ignore offline contacts or just show everyone in your address book. You can choose to archive all your conversations in your gmail account. There is no provision to archive them on your system, but I would trust the google servers more than my own hard drive. You can play around with various notification settings too, so you can customize google talk as much as your other messengers. Google Talk uses Chat Themes instead of backgrounds, and this goes a step further in changing the appearence of your conversation. There are five themes available as of now, but more must be on the way. Each has a picture/non-picture version.
Inspite of all of this, the messenger retains its simple look, for example, you can edit the status message by simply clicking on it instead of feeding it into a popup. The messenger can be downladed from http://desktop.google.com/download/googletalk/googletalk-setup-testing.exe. The official google talk site does not yet have a link, so this must be some kind of a pre-release set up.

No comments: