*New Version! (2.2)**Fixed small glitch that caused the count functions to return a <space> before the actual number, causing trouble when trying to use alert values with the plugin.
This plugin retrieves information like User Status, Online/Offline List, Unread Mail and a lot of other stuff from your MSN Messenger client.
Installation:First of all, make sure you are using MSN Messenger version 6.0 or newer. Don't confuse MSN Messenger with Windows Messenger. Windows Messenger looks similar to MSN and comes installed by default in WinXP. For some reason Microsoft has chose to make Windows Messenger share the same API and registry stuff as MSN Messenger. This can cause the plugin not to work. There are various ways to solve this: some people solved it by uninstalling Windows Messenger, while others had to first remove and then reinstall (crazy!) Windows Messenger. Please refer to
this forum post for more info.
To install the plugin, extract the contents of the zip file to your
Samurize\Plugins folder. Be sure to
KEEP the directory structure of the zip file. You have to end up with the file DeMo-MSN2.dll inside the plugins folder, and a subfolder called DeMo-MSN also inside the Samurize\Plugins folder. In this DeMo-MSN subfolder you should find a .ini file and some .png images.
Configuration:The only thing you have to set are the status messages. You can do this manually by editing the above mentioned .ini file. But I suggest you use the
Settings button inside the Config Editor!
Usage:Add a new plugin meter to your config, click the "Source" tab and select DeMo-MSN2.dll from the list, then select a function to run. Here is the description of each function:
GetMyNick: self explanatory.
GetMyStatus: self explanatory.
GetMyImageStatus: for this one to work you'll have to click the "General" tab and change the plugin Draw Type to "Image". This function will show a PNG based on your current status.
GetUserNickName: asks you for the user email and returns his nickname. If you don't know his email address, right click his nick in your contact list and you'll see an option to send email in the menu... his address appears there!
GetUserStatus: again will ask you for the email address and then returns the user status.
GetUserImageStatus: similar to the GetMyImageStatus but returns the image based on the user's status.
GetOnline: gets the list of online users. Away, Idle, Busy and other status are ignored here.
GetOnlineCount: returns the number of users online.
GetOnlineAndAway: similar to the GetOnline function but this time it won't ignore who is away/busy etc...
GetOnlineAndAwayCount: do I really need to say what it does?
GetOffline: gets the list of users currently offline.
GetOfflineCount: c'mon.. you know what it does!
GetUnreadMail: returns the number of unread mails in your hotmail.com or msn.com inbox.
Important:If you want to use your own images to represent yours or other users status, just add the images to the Samurize\plugins\DeMo-MSN folder and overwrite the current images (backup them first if you liked them!).
Be sure to keep the same file names as the original set!! online.png, offline.png, out_to_lunch.png and so on... The images
must be in the PNG format.
I've included a set of small (16x16) images. If you want to use them, follow the above instructions.. copy them to the parent folder overwriting the current images.
Thanks:Thanks to Tropics for providing help about using Mutexes. Thanks to Torsius, uziq and the Samurize dev team for helping me with the plugin timer functions and the new plugin SDK!!
Please comment/vote/suggest!
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