Gourt Home::Gourt :: Mercury Messenger
| Developer: | Danny |
|---|---|
| Latest beta release: | 1.8 RC1 / July 9, 2006 |
| Latest final release: | 1710 Final / August 8, 2005 |
| Use: | Instant Messenger |
| License: | Freeware |
| Website: | www.mercury.to |
| } | |
Mercury Messenger (previously dMSN, but changed on request of Microsoft) is an instant messaging program written in Java for Linux, Windows, Mac OS X and FreeBSD. It connects to the Windows Live Messenger (Formally MSN Messenger) and Jabber protocols.
Features
Mercury Messenger is a full featured WLM client, especially compared to the other competing clients. Mercury Messenger offers support for most features offered in Windows Live Messenger and several extra features implemented by the Mercury Messenger development team. The most notable extended features are:
- Tabbed conversations: This feature is very similar to tabbed browsing. It allows all conversations to be placed in one window, and to tab through them.
- Multiple accounts: Mercury offers the ability to use multiple accounts at the same time.
- Personal names: Personal names allow you to establish your own personal name for every separate conversations.
- Nickname and Personal Message scroller: The nick name and personal message scrollers scroll through a list of nick names and personal message every 30 seconds, and changes your name or personal message to correspond with the list.
- IRC style commands: Supports IRC slash commands (e.g /away)
- Event notification: Mercury offers versatile event notification. It will notify you when you are deleted from a contact list, when someone begins typing a message to you, and when someone closes a window. It offers support for many other minor events and also to act on certain events only for contacts that are selected.
- Customisable Views: In Mercury Messenger 1710 Beta and later the Contact View, Group View, General View, Contact Card, IM View and Chat View can now be designed to look exactly how a user wants, using HTML language to make designing these views simple yet powerful.
- Cross-platform compatibility: Since Mercury Messenger is written in Java, it can run on any operating system that has the Java Runtime Environment. Java JRE 1.4.2 and above is required.
Mac OS X and Linux
One of the most heavily touted features of this client is the support for Mac OS X and Linux. There are a number of other unofficial WLM clients for these platforms (see comparison of instant messengers) but while allowing multiple networks (ICQ, AIM etc.) they do not incorporate anything but the basic functionalities of Windows Live Messenger (this applies even to Microsoft's own Microsoft Messenger for Mac). Mercury Messenger supports several WLM-specific functions including webcams and is therefore considered to be one of the better options for Instant Messaging on these platforms, although the added overhead resultant of the client's reliance on Java has attracted quite a large amount of negative publicity towards the client. More recently, other Instant Messengers such as Kopete and aMSN have achieved Webcam functionality, and thus reduced the messenger's appeal.
References
- Mercury Messenger What Is Mercury. Retrieved June 19, 2006.
External links
Linux instant messengers | Mac OS instant messengers | Windows instant messengers | Jabber clients
Mercury Messenger | Mercury Messenger | Mercury Messenger | Mercury Messenger | Mercury Messenger
"Mercury Messenger"