I'm back in charge of things. That means you can ask me questions, like you did before (and I'll take too much time to answer some of them, as I did before ). That also means that software development is back on track, with proper releases, documented changes in the change log.

Most skinners, specially the good ones like Willz, are extremely busy with their personal lifes. And, unfortunately, there aren't that many people interested in making skins, only in requesting/using them.

The decline of IM in itself fails to attract new developers, and although the skinning platform is now more open, there is a lack of talent willing to exploit it. Windows Live Messenger 2009 has been the worse major Messenger build in terms of skinning developers and much of this boils down to the lack of designers who know what they are doing (excluding Willz).

It happened with the transition to MSN Messenger to Windows Live Messenger. There were at least 7 people making skins at that time and then all of a sudden they all disappeared leaving about 3.

Its the same thing now, it's just up to someone new to come in a keep things going. Really a person can only skin for so long before their personal lives become more involved and it becomes time to move on.

Ultimately its up to the new people to carry things onto 2010.

Looking at the raw stats it doesn't look so bad. Still millions of people using Plus!, number of active users fairly steady, certainly when you take into account the long time since the last major Plus! release (which always gives a nice boost). People are still downloading skins.

For now I'm aiming for something that is on-par with Messenger Plus!'s scripting, but once I reach that I hope to keep expanding and surpass it greatly. One of the advantages I have is the extensibility. Each package can export certain functionality, and as such anyone is free to extend the API as they wish. Someone could make a package solely dedicated to communicating with facebook or twitter, and other developers can then use those packages from their scripts, for example creating a script that keeps your facebook or twitter friends updated on how many contacts you have.

StuffPlug 3 was a pretty big mess to start with. I could cope with minor upgrades like 8.0 to 8.5. I relied heavily on certain stuff in messenger that got taken out or majorly overhauled in Messenger 9, like the UIFile parser or the way data binding worked, that I would need to re-write so many parts of StuffPlug3 to get it to work. I think it's better to start from scratch on something new.

Well, I'm trying to. Lately I'd been very busy juggling between University and having a social life, but I've got one month holiday (= this month, July) where I haven't planned anything else, and hope to get some major work done. Staying at my parents (= no need to worry about food, laundry, or other distractions) definitely helps to.

I'm not sure what happens after July though.

Maybe I'll end up staying motivated as I've got something more tangible at that point, maybe I'll be too busy with uni and social life as before, I never really know for sure.

Yes, hope­ful­ly at some point :) My slo­gan while de­vel­op­ing is "Hmm, I won­der if I can do this better ...

mynetx: Skins - good word. Is cus­tomiz­ing the Mes­sen­ger in­ter­face fun for you? Or a se­ri­ous busi­ness? Or in be­tween?

Will: Well a bit of both re­al­ly. Orig­i­nal­ly I start­ed skin­ning as a hobby so that I could help im­prove my abil­i­ties as a mul­ti­me­dia de­sign­er. I was hop­ing that by work­ing with an es­tab­lished user in­ter­face I would be able to gain a deep­er un­der­stand­ing as to how the user in­ter­prets UI’s.

I never re­al­ly ex­pect­ed to be doing it for that much main­ly be­cause I didn’t think that au­di­ence was big enough at the time. But it seems that has changed in re­cent times so now I do treat it more se­ri­ous­ly.

But yeah for the most part there is still the orig­i­nal sense of fun which at­tract­ed me to doing it in the first place.

For the past few weeks I have been playing around with 9 seeing what has changed and how far we can push things. I have to say that although there are a lot of changes and nearly double the amount of layout files to modify, overall 9 is going to bring some really interesting things to the table. One of the things I am looking forward to playing with is with some of the new effects that Messenger 9 brings such as fades, text glows and other types of animation.

I should also point out that I am only able to modify 9 because of a small workaround that was discovered that allows us to force Messenger to use its old layout files over the new ones. This allows skins, Messenger addons and patches to do their thing on 9 once again. Most people are counting this as a victory saying that stuff is possible again on 9, but really all this was was something to buy us some time. The old layout files have a really high chance of not existing in the final version of 9 so we will be back to square one.

The main problem about 9 still exists and in order for things to survive in the final version of 9 the new layout file format of Messenger 9 has to be figured out properly or we will be stuck with not being able to modify Messenger again. This new layout file isn't standard XML and style information that we can easily edit with any text editor, instead it is some weird file type that can't be read or edited properly without cracking it.