Mood Factory

Along with the evolution of technology, new ways of communication were born, and instant messaging application quickly came to power. One such example is Skype, which still lives on. Custom moods can be set, and with Mood Factory this can be done without having to bring up the main window.

Since the main target here is Skype, you need to have it installed on your computer to enable functionality. Skype announces you there’s a new plugin ready to be used, and you must allow it to run. No harm is done to your computer, and you can also take Mood Factory with you, because no installation is required, other than the regular integration in the IM client in question.

Sure enough custom moods can be set directly from Skype’s main window, but you’re limited to simple text when doing so. This small tool aims to bypass this limitation, and it does. On the one hand, you can insert multiple different emoticons through simple selection.

On the other hand, text can be customized with different styles like bold, underline, italic, centered, color, and size, with corresponding HTML code automatically written to enable this. Unfortunately, the only difference in appearance when it comes to mood is related to emoticons, because latest iterations of Skype don’t really allow support for different font styles.

You can grab your existing mood at the press of a button in case you want to simply make minor adjustments. The application needs to be launched through its executable every time you want to change the mood, because there’s no possibility to launch it through Skype. What’s more, it can’t be set to automatically launch with Skype, but it can be made to run with Windows by adding the shortcut to the system Startup folder.

All things considered, we come to the conclusion that Mood Factory comes with good intentions, but the length you need to reach in order to simply add smileys to your status message doesn’t really make up for the poor variety of features it provides. Font style can be changed, with HTML code automatically inserted, but there’s no actual change, since Skype doesn’t support different font styles.