More Photos of Live Messenger Wave 4

The new year starts interesting: More screenshots of Windows Live Messenger Wave 4 have been discovered by the Chinese news site LiveSino.net.

Windows 7 Taskbar

Windows 7 enhances your task bar with new features, like multiple taskbar thumbnails for the same application, as well as toolbar interfaces.  They allow applications to offer small in-thumbnail toolbars with the most-used functionality.  Messenger Wave 4 will make use of these toolbars: You can change your status directly from the taskbar.  Messenger 2009’s Windows 7 bug, showing 2 buttons for the Messenger main window, has been fixed.

Chat window

Looking at the conversation window, we don’t see much changes at first sight.  However, many small changes have been made, most notably the addition of tabs.  So, instead of having 4 chat windows for 4 conversations, you now have 1 window with 4 tabs.  Tabs look and feel much like Internet Explorer 8 tabs.

More subtle changes include changed toolbars.  For example, the Emoticons and Winks buttons are merged into one toolbar item:

PhotoShare has been enhanced too:  You can now share photos from Windows Live Photos as well as from Bing Images, on top of adding photos from your local hard drive.

Of course, these screenshots should not be considered final, as they show an excerpt of the Messenger Team’s current work that is subject to change until Windows Live Messenger 2010 gets released.

What do you think?