Summer is gone and it was time for an update. Messenger Plus! Live 4.83 brings its share of fixes and compatibility improvements for the latest version of Windows Live Messenger. If you want to keep on enjoying everything Messenger Plus! has to offer with the latest version of your software, download the update right away.

On another note, I’m glad to report this year’s contest was a smashing success and lots of people have started to post pictures of their prizes on their blogs or forums. If you haven’t done so yet, don’t hesitate to share your story with us :-). In the meantime, rest assured that major updates for Messenger Plus! are still being prepared. As anything worthwhile, it requires a lot of time and patience so for now, just enjoy Halloween!

A new version of your Messenger add-on is now available on this very web site. Version 4.82 will probably be one of the last of the 4th generation of Messenger Plus! as work on version 5 will officially begin during summer. For that reason, a complete health check-up in Windows 7 has been performed in today’s release. Some things have been fixed, some other things have been by improved. One example of that in the tighter integration of Tabbed Chats with the new Aero preview thumbnails.

As usual, you can read about every improvements and bug fixes in the change log. You can also give your thanks to the translators and the beta testers who help make sure Messenger Plus! keeps being reliable and dependable, every step of the way. Among the improvements, because so many users now enjoy skins and scripts of all kinds, the Import/Export feature of Messenger Plus! now back-ups your entire scripts and skins settings. One less worry for you to have next time you format your computer or you want to bring your set of personal settings with you.

And finally, if you saw nothing else in the change log that motivates you to upgrade, consider this: this release integrates everything that will be needed for the Messenger Plus! 2009 Contest which will begin next week! More about that will be said soon, but those of you who’ve been using the software for some time will probably recognize the little golden icon in their contact list and the meaning of it… you’ll just have to be patient for one more week until the contest and its prizes are revealed :-).

In case you wouldn’t have noticed already, Messenger Plus! Live 4.81 was released two weeks ago. We are so busy working on the next major release that we simply forgot to make a proper announcement about it. This new version includes improvements such as proper sorting of chat logs in the Log Viewer and a new way to support Messenger Plus! with the new plusnetwork.com home page (still in beta, not distributed to everywhere).

If you visit the Skins and Scripts section of this site, you’ll also notice an avalanche of new products, all free, all designed to improve your Messenger experience, technically and visually. We’re still working on the new database web site, in the meantime, please take a couple of minutes to browse our pages of listings :-). This month, we’re also getting a special treat from Willz: not 1 but 4 complex skins based on the forthcoming Transformers 2 movie. The first skin, Optimus Prime, is already available for download, the next ones will be released once a week until the end of the month.

After a longer than usual beta period, the new Messenger Plus! is finally ready and can be found in the download section of this site. Of course, the main attraction of version 4.80 is full compatibility with the latest version of Messenger, Windows Live Messenger 2009, and when we say “full compatibility”, we mean just that. You won’t find any ”light” trimmed-down version of your add-on here.

Despite the lack of visual changes in the software, the change log shows that many things were done under the hood. As often, scripts and skins in particular got their good share of improvements. There are now more than 500 of them in the official databases of this site. This means that you could spend the next month customizing Messenger with Plus!, its scripts and its skins and you would still haven’t seen everything. Big thanks to all the developers who keep on working on these improvements to make our daily IM life better.

In addition to the bug fixes and cosmetic improvements, this new Messenger Plus! also allows external developers to modify Messenger’s encoded windows’ files (UIB files) like they did with previous versions of Messenger. More information about that can be found in the skinning documentation. Note to all the developers reading this: Messenger Plus! is not required to be installed on your users’ computers for this feature to be used. The UIB files generated by Messenger Plus! can be read by Messenger just like the original ones which means that you can do the modifications you want on your system, encode the files and distribute the final result with your application.

Thank you for your renewed trust and support :-). Let’s have another great year together!