Things I like:
- Clean UI, not all the clutter of MSN Messenger
- Interop with iChat on Tiger through Jabber. Tried this last night, worked great.
- No Ads. I hate MSN because of this.
- Chat windows and the main friends window “snap” together when you move them close enough to each other. Then if you move the main friends window, it moves everything attached to it. Very nice.
- When you are typing a long message in chat, the textbox for you to type automatically gets bigger so you can see your whole message. Sweet.
Things I might like:
- The Talking. Don’t have anybody to try this with at work, no mic. Since no Google Talk for OS X yet, no testing this out for me. Docs say it should work through firewalls and NAT, so it sounds promising.
Things I don’t like:
- No graphical emoticons. You have got to be kidding me, how can you release without these.
- Tray Icon is plain. Icon looks almost exactly like the iChat menu bar icon. But this is XP, not the OS X menu bar, and you need color to standout from the other baubles in the tray.
- Can’t control the fonts in chat. I like seeing different colors for people chatting so I can at a glance see who sent the last message. This isn’t hard.
- It’s a Beta. Do these people ever release anything?
Random Windows XP Complaint:
- I wish there were shadows under non-maximized windows, like in OS X. Google Talk makes this so obvious because they are using a, possibly, 1 pixel border around all their windows. All the overlapping windows just jumble together.