In this, the third post of the week in apps series, Tim and I. Will be looking at Instant Messaging clients.
For inter-service compatibility, there is none to beat AdiumX. Being open source I can always run the latest version on the svn tree- not suggesting this as a smart thing to do. The SVN version occasionally has it’s glitches but on the whole is very stable. Just before writing this article I ran svn update and recompiled from the latest build (17291), actually a later build as that one wouldn’t compile.
Adium is an open source Instant Messanger with full support for XMPP, Yahoo, MSN, AIM, gTalk, bonjour and several other protocols. Originally it used libgaim for this but now it uses a mix of libgaim, libezv and joscar- with smack soon to be used for XMP (this will have jingle support and will eventually allow Adium users to talk with gTalk users.
Adium 1.0 was released in 2001 by a student called Adam Iser, but was re-written to form AdiumX (originally planned to be Adium 2.0). Adium uses OSX’s built in html component (WebKit) to display each chat, and this allows for easy themeing of the chat window with only knowledge of HTML and css). Also the contact list is easy to theme and in the SVN version will hide on an edge of the screen and can be configured to only show as little or as much user information as it takes to show who’s online.
Adium has full out of the box support for Growl, a universal notifications protocol for OSX. Which allows you to be constantly informed of when someone comes online or sends you a message. Also possible is to have notifications read out using the system voice.
