Messages beta due for the chop

So it seems Apple have announced that its Messages (beta) app is gonna bite the dust (expire;()on Friday 14th December. You're up the creak if your box won't go to Mountain Lion land (like quite a few older machines).

Darn. I might even have paid for a real app along the same lines as it has been quite handy to be able to use a real keyboard to send iMessages.

Apple's Messages beta expired....NOT

Final Update: It has now expired - see here.

Update: No it had NOT died yet, but it had just seemed to be dead - but after rebooting my machine it came back to life and worked fine again. I'll update the post if I discover what made it appear to be dead...

Well it seems that Apple's Messages beta app (on Lion) expired today (the app started but most menu items were greyed out) which is a shame as it was quite useful to be able to send messages to pals that had iMessage. I don't know why they don't do a separate app available for download as Mountain Lion is only installable on newer hardware. I guess they want people to upgrade...

Although under the hood it was really iChat and as a matter of fact so was Facetime (aka: Viceroy 1.5.0) with a couple of extra features...

Let me know if you find any tweaks to bring it back to life (I tried the basic ones like changing the date back with no luck).