The Myspace IM client... man it's ugly

After install and when signing in, there’s an immediate flaw which stems from a bigger flaw. They’ve re-done all the window controls into something custom, but not properly like say Yahoo! did, but in some half-assed way. One specific expression of “half-assed” for me was that the password field doesn’t have the Paste function. So even if you got a really mad leet password which you keep securely in your password vault, you need to re-type it byte for byte. Yay.

So… without further blah, here’s the main UI.

Immediate flaws spotted here…

• no ClearType. Folks, if you really have to use some leet custom font and windowing functions, please do it properly. Anything without font smoothing support makes my eyes hurt. Really. I’m crying now. Plus it got worse when I tried the IM function which also spits out nice non-smoothed text.
• the pictures — what are you doing to them!?!??! Apparently all pictures in the client must be squares. Which the client does not by, say, cropping the middle like Flickr does in their index view generator, but just by taking whatever image you have there and mutilating it by re-scaling only one axis until it becomes a square one. How nice. Why oh why… the images are fine on the site.

So this was only strictly about some tiny parts of the UI. I can’t really speak for how well it works or doesn’t, since I don’t really use Myspace that much other than for experiments with their functions. The client-site integration seems to work — the images were downloaded nicely and it adds your friends.