With the amount of news rolling in, anyone would think there was a show taking place this Saturday, so I’d better check the calendar… Ah, yes – that’ll be the London Show, then. That probably explains the latest announcement from R-Comp:
R-Comp is pleased to announce the release of Messenger Pro 10 (can you believe it has been 4 years since v9?) – a significant expansion of Messenger Pro’s functionality. We’ve tried to address a number of the perceived “room for improvement” areas of Messenger Pro in this release – we hope you enjoy the new features…
HTML email handling/display
Messenger Pro can now display HTML emails including pictures for a much nicer experience when viewing the emails that companies (and indviduals) send you. For security, Messenger Pro will only fetch pictures for contacts whom you know (in your address book) unless you click to confirm fetching. Even that is configurable via a setting in the choices. The software also supports in-line attached images using the “cid” reference model. The HTML supports copy/paste etc just like you’d expect, and you can still conduct the usual message operations on HTML emails. Javascript is ignored for security.
A fallback to browser-based HTML rendering is still available.
3 column mode
Many of our users also run email clients on other platforms and have mentioned that they quite like the multi-column views offered by those email clients. Whilst Messenger’s traditional separate-window approach could be saved into position to simulate this kind of operation, Messenger Pro 10 introudces an (optional) full 3 column mode. In this mode (designed for 1080p or higher monitors) the toolbars are revised and the UI is updated to work more coherently in this new viewing mode.
Functionally 3-column-mode offers the usual facilities of Messenger Pro, just laid out in a more conventional manner with no need for the user to manually set that up.
Improved Unicode support
Much to the relief of our German users (who qualify for a free update to 10.00 by way of understanding) the UniCode support in v10 has been expanded and now covers all the corners of the software (we hope). This means that translation between RISC OS’ Latin alphabet and UTF8 unicode is handled tranparently in areas like copy/paste, drag’n’drop and message load/saving as well as when viewing emails and message lists. v10 should finally give great results whether you’re viewing Latin or Unicode emails, with transparent translation between.
Affected users should drop us an email requesting their free upgrade, with a brief mention of their prior difficulty.
Smart sort
Sometimes you want to change the sort order of your emails. Of course this has been possible since the earliest versions by left or right-clicking on the column headings in the Messages window, or using the menus.
We’ve now introduced a smarter function – highlighting a message before changing the sort order now tracks that message, moving to that position in the new order.
For example, if you want to see all the messages from Bob Smith, but don’t want to run a traditional search, simply highlight one of his messages and click on the Sender heading. The list will be grouped by Sender, and his email will remain highlighted and in view.
You can then click back on Date order and the view will return to its previous state with Bob’s email still highlighted.
Better searches
When displaying search results, the emails are now sorted sensibly before display, making it much easier to work with. Sure, it only saves a click or two, but it makes life much better when searching.
New ways to fetch emails – IMAP, OAuth2, Gmail etc
A beta of a new email fetcher is included with v10 – we hope to develop this further after the show. This allows a variety of additional options when fetching email over secure connections, including a solution to Microsoft’s OAuth2 requirements for Hotmail/Outlook addresses. Fetching from Gmail is also possible, and the software supports SMTP, POP and IMAP fetches. It actually originates from one of the 64-bit projects, as a 64bit email transport was needed.
64-bit support
Following on from that, Messenger Pro 10 now has a 64-bit version. This will be made available once further progress is made towards 64-bit, but will be offered as part of the v10 upgrade program as it already exists for test purposes.
As usual there are no doubt further small updates and enhancements, as well as the usual bug fixes etc.
Messenger Pro 10 is available now on !Store and the upgrade costs £20.00.
Note – HTML email display requires RISC OS 5 or newer due to technical requirements and unicode font support. RISC OS 4 users have a fallback mode and browser-based HTML display options.
