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!