Using instant messenger (IM) is becoming widely adopted in all corners of technology. If at the beginning it were some novel home users, then more families and friend, now its much more established way of communication in many areas including business.
I’ve began using ICQ in late 1998 (its almost 10 years ago!), when the whole concept was not really clear to me or much any others as well. But after trying to have a conversation with someone over email, I understood the easiness and speed of conversation that IM would allow me to have. I even have an 8-digit userID in ICQ still.
Then in early 2000s, I’ve seen a spike in Hotmail usage and other online web mail services. After signing up to hotmail, I automatically got (and got upgraded to MSN Passport after that) an MSN user account.
There’s no need to speak about Google Mail and their Talk client.
So, as anyone can understand, I’m very connected to the world, but within *3* different networks. And it is very inconvenient to use 3 IM client programs to access them all.
So I turned to Open Source movement for solution – and I’ve found one. A project called Pidgin (GAIM in the past), have created a program which allows to connect to any network one can imagine – the only requirement is that that network opens access protocols. And all major networks do.
So, as I use Mac Mini on my desktop, my solution is based on this open source project. The program that leverages it and I use is Adium.
Adium is Mac OS X client built upon Pidgin library using native excellent Mac OS X interface. Its home page shows 13 (!) ways to connect with other people, including iChat, Yahoo!, Google, ICQ/AIM, MSN and many others.
Adium is very intuitive application, and if you’ve used an IM client for some years up to today, you’ll feel home right away. It has a list of all your contacts in one place, so you don’t even have to know to which network belongs your friend.Excellent graphics and user interface make it easy to communicate with many people at once. It is great when you’re talking with a friend from one network and want to deliver messages to a friend from other. You can even change an interface using different color and skin themes. It allows encryption of conversations, file transfer and tabbed windows. At this point no voice/video conversations are available, but Pidgin team (which develops the infrastructure for Aduim client) is working on these features.
Adium supports .Mac service so you can have your contacts right away. It supports many languages which adds to a program.
One of the best features of the Adium, is that it supports extensions (plugins) which provide or change additional functionality of the client. Such plugins can extend the basic program and provide additional features or interface elements. For example, there are external experimental plugins for voice chat features, which shows that feature development can go independently of the main project team.
I highly recommend using Adium as unified IM client on your Mac.
Note: there are minimal OS level requirements for using Adium. One should check it on Adium web site: http://www.adiumx.com/
Related posts:
Twitter