Seeing as Flash Player 9 is at 84% penetration, it’s time for the big guns to start releasing content that targets this awesome new version. Obviously, a bunch of Flex 2 applications are already in the wild, but I imagine that the next several months will bring an explosion of great new additions. Today, Yahoo! announced the beta version of a Yahoo! Messenger client for the web. Even more exciting, its built with Flex 2! Cross-platform goodness for everyone.
Of particular note, you’ll see that it has a Yahoo!-themed skin, and only a few elements look like the Flex defaults. Personally, I’d like to see the Messenger team push it a step further to skin everything, but its a good first step. I like the integration with search, avatars, and all the cool little menus around the application.
Here’s my favorite: if you mouse over one of your contacts, you’ll notice that a little down-facing arrow appears to the right. Mmmm… a custom list item renderer. When you click on this arrow, a menu pops up with additional options for that specific contact. This is a very interesting choice because the desktop version of Messenger uses the right-click context menu. While Flash Player allows you to customize its context menu pretty easily, very few applications make use of this feature. I imagine even fewer users realize that this menu will ever look different than the defaults. I know I never check to see if someone used it. The developers of this application are showing their mojo by realizing that the web-based version needs some specific alterations to maximize usability. I love it! I need to build my own version of this component. 
Congrats Messenger team and Yahoo! on releasing a great new app built with Flex 2!
Have you seen Google’s Gtalk online version built with Flash8?
http://talkgadget.google.com/talkgadget/popout
IMHO, Google looks sooo much appealing..
They use the similar UI approach to emulate the context menu with a right mouse button click over the arrow button
JabbyPanda, isn’t that the one that’s part of GMail’s interface? Personally, I think it’s too visually simple (and I like Google’s approach to interfaces, generally), and I found it very annoying when it connected every time I checked my email. I disabled it some time ago.
Hi Josh,
Those are two different versions, the one that is bundled with Gmail UI (DHTML based) and the one the direct link to I had just provided.
Flash based version opens a video player playing YouTube videos and image viewer to view Flickr photos directly inside messaging window – using Flash capabilities to the max!
Unfortunately, VoIP is not supported in Flash based IM, I suspect mainly because of limitations of Flash9, let’s wait untill Flash 10