Adium vs. iChat??

[Aarow]

Am I the only one who pictured a duck and a chat bubble battling to the death?

 

[howesey]

Chock one up here for Adium. iChat indeed feels much too confining - although (correct me if I am wrong) Adium does not support video chatting?

Where aMSN comes into play.

 

[shrimpdesign]

I'm surprised that no one mentioned the extras and how they are integrated... you go to adiumxtras.com and click "install" on anything. Adium pops up, downloads it, and installs it. No messy icons on your desktop that you have to unzip and move to a plug-ins folder, it's all done for you. When I first found Adium, I thought it was amazing, then I installed something from their xtras, and I thought Adium was the best application for the Mac. Ever.

Not really though, I can think of better apps now, but it was really cool at the time.

 

[swindmill]

One of the worst things about iChat is the amount of screen space it takes up. With aol contacts and jabber contacts, it takes up as much screen space as any other app. An IM app should be hardly noticeable on the desktop

 

[NoNameBrand]

The only thing i don't like about adium is it mixes all your buddy lists. If you get more than one person using the application the accounts mixes up.

You mean, more than one person on your computer? why not use multiple accounts in OS X? works fine that way here.

I absolutely love Adium. Before I was using three chat clients (MSN, iChat, ICQ) to talk to all of my friends, and now I've got one. I use GAIM (on Linux) at work and it just doesn't compare.

 

[ephica]

AIM file transfer fixed in Adium 0.85

i just wish they fix aim transfers by v1.0....and hope that comes soon

actually, it has already been fixed, since version 0.85

Adium Version History

Version 0.85 (10/12/2005)

Updated libgaim to obtain AIM file transfer Summer of Code improvements and other fixes

AIM file transfer Summer of Code improvements

For the Gaim project, users of AOL and ICQ have file transfer capability comparable to the modern official clients.
No longer when one of my friends attempts to transfer a file to me and must I explain to them that I must switch from Gaim to another AIM client before the file transfer will work. Previously, my friends would focus on this one deficiency rather than seeing the other great features of the program. Not any more. Now I can say "Yeah, Gaim can do that." Adding this functionality to Gaim has strengthened its position as a first-class instant messaging program.

(the same can now be said for adium as well, since it uses libgaim for filetransfers.)


now, that being said, i don't want to step over anything. were you aware of the recent updates, but you are wishing for further improvements?

for example, adium and trillian (a multi-client for windows like adium) still have issues with file transfer between eachother. though one could say it's the trillian developers' responsibility to update it to use the newer file transfer method (at least for some transfers it uses an outdated method, which is compatible with official IM clients, but not adium or any other gaim-based instant messengers.)

 

[kretzy]

I really like the look of iChat, and would use it except that all of my contacts are on MSN (as am I). Adium is the best alternative. I've tried out aMSN, MSN Messenger, Fire and Mercury all of which I've found to be inferior to Adium.