We’re just putting the finishing touches on the 1.3 release of Palringo for Windows-based devices. The latest beta is as usual available on http://beta.palringo.com.

Notification Options

We’ve given you finer-grained control over how alerts are presented when you receive new messages. We believe we’ve come up with a settings page that’s both intuitive to understand, and flexible to use.

You can now choose different alert types for private and group messages. For example, you can choose to be alerted audibly for private messages, but not disturbed at all by the constant influx of new group alerts.

Furthermore, on the PC version of Palringo, you can now have message windows automatically open as alerts in the task bar. We’ve found this especially nice in conjunction with the upcoming Windows 7 user interface.

Contact List Quick Search

If like many of us you have billions of contacts, you can now quickly find the one you need by typing the first few characters of their nickname into the contact list screen. The list is instantly filtered to show only the contacts matching your query. On devices with a numeric keyboard, T9 matching is used to simplify text input.

Service Identity Settings

It is now possible to set your nickname and status message on all connected services – not just Palringo.

Furthermore, we’ve launched a novel feature called AutoText. Now, you can insert tags into your status message which are automatically expanded to convey real-time information about your presence.

For example, you could change your status to “Skiing in [loc]”, and this will be seen by others as “Skiing in [Villars, CH]”. Currently only location is supported as an AutoText tag, but we soon plan to add others. Imagine your MSN contacts seeing your status message as “Listening to [music] on my [device] while skiing in [loc]”.

Facebook Chat Support

Previously in beta, we’ve now unleashed Facebook chat support onto the world. You can add your Facebook account, just like any other service, and see which contacts are online, chatting with them in real time.

Other Changes

Since version 1.2.3 launched in late December, we’ve also been working away on a multitude of other tweaks and fixes. A non-exhaustive list is below:

• Contact locations now include a timestamp, allowing you to see how up-to-date the location is.
• Fixed a potential crash when closing map windows before the map had fully loaded.
• Bandwidth saving – maps are not downloaded unless the control is visible.
• GPS location may work on a wider range of devices.
• Added properties to the contacts menu, so you can see a map of all your contacts.
• On friend requests, the service icon now shows, so you can easily identify the source of the request.
• Better performance when viewing the user lists for large groups.
• Added setting to control display of exit confirmation dialog box.