Introduction

If you are looking for a tool that can create these toasts in a fast, WYSIWYG manner, then HopperLive is a must! Interested? Head for HopperLive Website to find out more!

Development Story

I started to use mIRC about May 2003, and I liked /hop, one of mIRC's commands, very much because it somewhat told other people "to take notice of me." Likewise, I enjoyed doing Appear Offline/Go Online in a row in MSN Messenger. Messenger Plus! (the predecessor of Messenger Plus! Live) provided many fun and useful functions for its users, yet why didn't it have such a function that does it for me? If so, I just needed to type a command, instead of doing quite a few mouse clicks. At that time, Plus! had a feature that let programers develop their own special funcionalities and integrate them with Plus! (the plugins). I myself programmed a bit, but I didn't know if I was capable of designing such a command (as I'd requested in the forums, however, I bet lots of people would use and love the command).

Anyway I gave it a try. At the end of July 2003, the first Hopper command - /xhop was created using Visual Basic, and it worked like a charm. Like I had guessed, the plugin was very popular. Yet soon I was told that Hopper got used to flood others. To prevent Hopper from being used for such purposes, I eventually added the anti-flood protector. Some gave me negative comments about the protection, consequently. Well, I didn't want to "lose users" nor did I want Hopper to be used in any bad way. So I began to develop more functionalities for Hopper, such as show x toasts in a row, custom toast messages or delayed hop. Also, I cut down on the time limit of the protection. And Hopper Control Center, a visualized control panel, also made things much easier.

I gradually developed my interest in coding C++ in second year of senior high; in class we learned basic C++ syntax and some basic algorithms/data structures. I wanted to give myself some challenge so I tried my hand at recoding Hopper completely in Visual C++. As I had guessed, the more powerful language made Hopper more powerful. In September 2004, the developemnt of Hopper³ began - it was a new, completely redesigned version since 2.42 released earlier that summer. After five months of coding, it was released along with a new website. Hopper³ was also included as my project when I applied for universities in 2005 too.

In the first half of 2006, Microsoft released Windows Live Messenger, the successor to MSN Messenger. With the release came Messenger Plus! Live. I called this "the Live fever" because it seemed that everything related to Messenger and Plus! had postfixed its name with Live. Messenger Plus! Live came with a different add-on mechanism: it had scripts to replace plug-ins. The change from plug-ins to scripts meant two things: first, I needed to adopt a new programming language (scripts used JScript); and second, it made feasible some things that were impossible before, and made infeasible some things already in Hopper³. This gave me the best opportunity to recode and also deconstruct/reconstruct Hopper. After a year in the computer science-related department in university, my programming skills were improved, and I was eager to try them on Hopper. Following the Live fever, the successor to Hopper³ was named HopperLive. I considered every piece of Hopper³ and thought "should this functionality be ported to HopperLive?" and also posted a poll on Plus! forums to find out what functions in Hopper³ were least used. In summer 2006, HopperLive, the fourth and the best major version of Hopper, was released.