UE Chat Beta 3

It’s finally time to talk about the latest version of UE Chat, which greatly needed an upgrade. Beta 2 (and even 2.1) was very glitchy, don’t get me wrong though it was a very powerful and good looking app. The chatting experience needed to be improved though, and something that looked like it belongs on a desktop didn’t seem to cut it for me. Beta 3 however aims to fix all these bugs and add features that should amaze.

What’s Fixed & Improved

So what was broken anyways? First off, you had to login. That wasn’t the main problem though, because it didn’t work with your UE Community account, meaning you always had to keep logging in. This kept you farther from the chat experience, and so in beta 3 you don’t have to login anymore. Also when you refresh the page or come back to it later, your nickname and messages are all restored.

Another really annoying problem was when you are typing a message, and you receive a private chat mesage. The focus of the text box would be moved to the private message window, meaning if you were typing some important or private, you might accidentally send it to the wrong person. Now, UE Chat brings tabs into play so that you can easily switch between rooms and messages and whenever you receive a new message, that tab will blink but it will not be activated until you click on it. Nice, isn’t it?

Other minor improvements includes when sending messages they would be distorted (extra spaces for example). Also not to mention smileys would cause the chat not to scroll down fully, and you would constantly be signed out after a period of time for some users.

Commands & Cool Features

UE Chat is a lot like IRC, and the best thing about IRC is the plethora of commands. A command is like an instruction, except to the chat system itself. Now in UE Chat, you can do stuff like send rss feeds, do math calculations, slap someone, play the coin flip game, and other general ones like changing your nick, sending private messages etc.

You will probably notice that there is a log in/sign up section though, which leads to the community. This is because that registered users will receive more features. So once you’re logged in, you will notice there’s a music playlist and a sharing feature. The music playlist is the same as from previous versions, but it does include a reload button so you don’t have to refresh the whole page to see new songs. The sharing feature allows you to share the chat with virtually any network which includes Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Yahoo!, Google, and much more.

The Docs & Tour

One major thing the old chat was missing was a help section. How were you to know about all the features, what certain things meant, and many general things that you can’t seem to find? In beta 3, you get all that. There is now a docs section as well as a video tour.

In Conclusion

I am really happy to finally announce UE Chat beta 3, which brings many more features and a much better chatting platform to the table. There are many more features than mentioned here, and there will be even more improvements as time moves on so go check out UE Chat for yourself and let me know what you think.