Niels Hartvig's umbraco blog

It's that time again - Just three weeks after the major release of 2.1, we're ready to ship a stability release.

In software like this there's always bugs and minor problems even though you test and test and test. We had a four month test phase on 2.1 with beta, rc1 and rc2 before we released. But still - the moment people really started stressing the release, using it in production environments and new umbraco users came in, the reports started coming.

One of the problems with 2.0 was that we never got an official stability release out. We simply didn't have an environment that was ready for all the bug reports that came in and for the multiple versions of umbraco that we were developing (the development of 2.1 started as soon as 2.0 was out). We've learned a lot the past one and a half year, and now we reacted fast and got 24 improvements and minor fixes ready.

That is a great evidence that at last we're ready to respond and that should make most people confident that umbraco is a safe choice...

Read the full details at umbraco.org.

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I just got the latest version of Microsoft MSN Messenger; now named Live Messenger. What struck me first, was the use of screen real estate in the main window. It might be due to my rather low resolution (1024x768), but I still think it isn't optimal:

The main window has 264992 total number of pixels (without the border and the menus). I colored the different sections and here's the use:

• Brown/Orange: Name (aka who am I?): 15%
• Cyan: Advertisement: 13%
• Red: Blank (!): 4%
• Buddy list: 45%

My only use of the main window is the buddy list, which only uses 45% of the screen real estate. If I could decide something (a part from removing the advertisement and the search which isn't an option, I guess) I would remove the bottom bar "The Future of MSN Messenger" and resize the Name section into one third.

I'd also remove the "Click here to find out about music personal messages". The search part is also rather unneceassary, but I guess they just try to squeeze it in everywhere. Honestly - I wouldn't use an Instant Messenging program to start my search...

I think its a pity to see that the messenger app loose it's focus. This was why I switched from ICQ to Messenger in the old days, because of the tight and focused design of Messenger. With less than half of the screen real estate used on the important part, I guess ICQ was even better. Hopefully this will improve in the final - non beta - version :-)