Forwarding Address: OS X

Wednesday, September 28, 2005

Adium instead of iChat

It is easy to get sucked into Apple's applications that come with OS X, particularly when you compare them to the lame ones that Microsoft includes with XP. But there are ones that are better.

I wasn't all that keen on using IM a few years ago, but it was convenient for a few friends I had. When I first launched iChat, I was quite impressed. I've been using it a few years, and became surprisingly fond of it.

Then Tim Bray recommended Adium, and I took a look at it. In short, if you like iChat but don't use the voice capabilities, you may love Adium. You can make the contacts window much more compact, you can have all your chats in one tabbed window, Adium integrates many more IM services than iChat, and you can change the color schemes easily. If you have a long list of chat partners on different services, Adium will cause you to remove iChat from the dock.

7 Comments:

  • Proteus and Fire are both very nice multi-protocol clients as well. I prefer Proteus of the three.

    By Anonymous, at 6:37 PM  

  • Every time I've tried to switch away from iChat I've immediately found myself needing to a do file transfer. Until Adium can do them 100% reliably, I'm stuck in iChatland sadly.

    By Brian W, at 8:29 PM  

  • Adium also supports Growl notifications (that's where Growl came from, in fact).

    By pbx, at 7:12 AM  

  • Does it support the menu bar status icon? That’s my must-have feature from iChat.

    By Nate, at 10:49 AM  

  • Nate,

    Yes, Adium has a Menu Bar icon that shows your away status, just like iChat. The only thing it doesn't do that I wish it did is give you the Buddy List in the Menu Bar menu.

    By Seth, at 3:48 PM  

  • I've used Proteus, iChat, and Fire before, and I've found Adium to easily be the superior IM client. Plus, Adium handles Jabber connection way better than Proteus or Fire.

    By Jon, at 7:13 PM  

  • i'm with brian...until file transfer is 100% reliable, my hands are tied. it's not the 99 times i dont need the transfer, it's the one time i do.

    peace

    By skrauntor, at 5:01 PM  

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