Windows Vista, as pretty as it looks, can still use some prettying up. Here’s a list of utilities (all developed by one person: Andreas Verhoeven) which contribute to improving the look and feel of your beautiful Windows Vista.

Glass Toasts - this allows your system tray notifications to have the Aero Glass look. This surely beats the relatively ugly looking tips that we see today. This one works on Windows XP as well. So, if you are still running XP, you can still give this a spin.

3D User Picture - this one is a favorite. It replaces the user picture in the Start Menu with a much better alternative: an animated 3-D picture.

This surely beats the comparatively dull looking picture that you get on the Start Menu.

This however comes at a small cost (nopes, you don’t need to pay for any licensing). The cost is that you need to have a DirectX capable Graphics card for this to work.

Thumbnail Resizer - this one is really good for those of you who have high resolution monitors and so those thumbnails  that are show when you hover above the taskbar buttons become really small. This allows you to resize the thumbnails to suit your vision. The source code is available for this if you want to see how it is working under the hood.

To get a hold of all these cool tools, visit Ave’s Vista Stuff. He has another tool up there for you to checkout.

After a long time waiting, Yahoo Messenger for Windows Vista is finally out. If you use Yahoo Messenger for your IM needs, then you will really like this specially-made-for-Windows-Vista release of Yahoo Messenger.

As you can see in the image, the new version has beautiful graphics. That is the biggest change. It uses the Aero features to deliver a very pretty looking UI.

However, beautiful UI is not the only change that is present. There are some more features that have been added to the messenger with a large number of features promised over the next few months.

We go over some of the new features that are now available in this ‘Preview’ of the Yahoo Messenger for Vista.

Skins

There is a capability of skinning the Yahoo Messenger window. Not only that, there is the capability to skin individual conversation Windows. This allows you to keep the visualization interesting once you have a number of conversartions going on. It remembers the skin that you choose for a given contact so that when you open a conversation with that contact again, it will use the same skin.

Sidebar Gadgets

There is the capability of dragging a contact to the Vista Sidebar. This allows you to track the status of and quickly access your more common contacts.

Tabs

This is a feature that I like a lot. If you have multiple conversations going, you no longer need to have so many windows open. Each conversation can appear as a tab in one conversation window. All you have to do is to drag mutltiple conversations in the same window and it will add it as a new tab.

Contact Scaling

You can choose a bigger size to see contact images or avatars on your messenger window. Not only can I see contacts in a bigger mode, if I resize the main Window to make it bigger, the contact list switches to a multi-column mode to show more contacts (as in the image below).

Emoticons

The emoticons are now handled differently. When you receive or send an emoticon, it animates in a bigger size before going back to the normal size.

This is just a preview release and Yahoo has provided a feedback button on each window to let users give feedback for improvement. Let’s see what changed come about between now and the final release.