Comments on: Adium, the Mac-based instant-messaging king

Adium is the best chat client available for the Mac OS. Period. It also happens to be 100 percent open source.

[carrio110]

Honourable mention to pidgin

Pidgin (nee GAIM) is also worth a look. Unfortunately it doesn't do skype and doesn't do Mac, but it is coming of age rather rapidly. It supports a wide range of protocols too.

[caroline.mccarthy]

Great post, Matt!

I've been using Adium for about two months now and I'm astounded by how feature-heavy and customizable it is. My favorite part is how well I can tweak it to match my desktop background without looking like a corny all-in-one skin theme.

(I, too, was skeptical about the duck.)

[markawatson]

Adium versus ichat

When I first got a mac (which btw was your fault) I tried Proteus, Adium and
ichat. This was moving from Gaim on Linux. I much preferred Proteus, paid
for a copy, but development seemed to be on a tectonic timescale, and
moved to Adium. I stayed there for a long while, but now every member of
the family has a mac (for which you are to blame) I use ichat. The company
chat is on jabber, which ichat handles better than adium (it can use it for
video). The family chat is .mac, and again I can use it for video when on the
road. Everyone else I need to speak to has AIM.

The problem with Adium is that ichat is more than good enough, even if
Adium is better for certain things.

BTW is it just me or does this blog look awful in Safari?

[Matt Asay]

Sorry for corrupting you, Mark

...though it was just a matter of time. You have too much taste and good sense to stick with Windows. ;-)

I agree that if you're dealing with an AIM-centric world that iChat is probably better. I talk with a range of people, however, who refuse to move off YIM and MSN (OK, this latter group works at Microsoft :-). So a multi-protocol client is important. But when I see my family online and we want to video chat (which is often because my kids love talking with family through iChat's video conferencing), we go straight to iChat.

[odubtaig]

Better than Skype

Gizmo (http://gizmoproject.com/download.php)

All three main platforms and it uses standard SIP protocols so SIP phones and other SIP compatible software. like Kphone, can connect to the service. Much better support for localised dial-in numbers as well.