Since Messages is currently the only way to send/receive iMessages on the Mac, I was thinking of making the jump back to Messages after using Adium for ages. However, a large number of my (foolish) friends still MSN, and Messages still seems to have no in-built support.
I'm wondering if there are any good, and active, MSN add-on plugins for iChat/Messages? I heard MSN now uses XMPP, but with a stupid custom authentication mechanism (trust Microsoft to add standards support without following the standards ).
The only other alternative seems to be using XMPP transports, which is easy enough to setup using a local XMPP server such as OpenFire with the Kraken Gateway plugin (the 1.1.3 beta, earlier seems to be broken). But this is a very messy solution since MSN contacts appear as <contact_address>@msn.<xmpp_server>, which of course causes the contacts to split even if their address book card has their MSN details, since Messages isn't aware of transports. Adding the transport addresses isn't the worst thing in the world, but it's a bit annoying.
Anyway, I'm curious what options are available, as I can't just ditch half of my contacts, but I also don't want to run multiple IM clients.
I'm wondering if there are any good, and active, MSN add-on plugins for iChat/Messages? I heard MSN now uses XMPP, but with a stupid custom authentication mechanism (trust Microsoft to add standards support without following the standards ).
The only other alternative seems to be using XMPP transports, which is easy enough to setup using a local XMPP server such as OpenFire with the Kraken Gateway plugin (the 1.1.3 beta, earlier seems to be broken). But this is a very messy solution since MSN contacts appear as <contact_address>@msn.<xmpp_server>, which of course causes the contacts to split even if their address book card has their MSN details, since Messages isn't aware of transports. Adding the transport addresses isn't the worst thing in the world, but it's a bit annoying.
Anyway, I'm curious what options are available, as I can't just ditch half of my contacts, but I also don't want to run multiple IM clients.