After considering and postponing it for quite a while, I've finally added Aero Peek thumbnails preview to TabSRMM 3. This gives you per tab preview on the Windows 7 task bar and works pretty similar to other applications supporting this new Windows 7 feature. Examples would be Internet Explorer 8 or Opera 10.5x.

However, there is one important difference: The previews do not show a simple thumbnail of the message window itself, because this would be next to useless. Unlike web pages, all message sessions are looking pretty much the same, so it would be quite hard to identify a single session by looking at a small representation of its window contents.

TabSRMM implements Aero Peek previews by creating a custom thumbnail for each session. The thumbnail will show basic information about the session, like the contact's name, its status message and - when available - its avatar. All the text inside such a thumbnail is easily readable and the avatar is large enough to instantly recognize a message tab by its custom thumbnail.

Alongside with this new feature comes support for large (32 x 32 pixels) icons on task bar buttons - also an important thing for Windows 7 users and something that nicely complements the already existing support for overlay icons on task bar buttons.

This completes one of the basic goals for TabSRMM 3 - support for Windows 7 features. I considered jump lists as well, but decided that they are not offering much for instant messenger, because of their document orientated approach. The only thing which might make some sense would be a "recently closed" jump list implementation, but this is not important enough to delay the upcoming release of TabSRMM 3 longer than needed.

After adding so many new features and cleaning up the plugin from old and obsolete stuff, it is now time to enter a stabilization phase of development. Some features are still not fully complete and this will be addressed in the near future. Naturally, fixing bugs is another goal.

So, basically, TabSRMM 3 is now feature complete and there won't be any major new things except those already present in the plugin. The new task bar features will be in the next alpha release; the code was commited a few days ago.

For those who do not want Aero Peek previews, the feature can be disabled in Options->Message Sessions->Advanced tweaks. Note that this is separated from the Aero UI, the task bar thumbnails work in any rendering mode (skinned, visual styles or Aero) and you do not have to use the Aero UI.