Adium: Best Chat Client on the Planet
I’ve fallen head over heels for Adium. It’s hands down the best chat client I’ve used my entire internet life.
I was introduced to IMing back in 1995 with AOL. There was no AOL Instant Messenger then, only the built in solution, so there was no way of speaking with anyone outside of AOL unless you went to a forum or bulletin board, which it was affectionately known as at the time. Eventually, however, the internet became a much larger pool (arguably, it was a larger pool before that, I just had no need to go beyond what I knew) and with that larger pool came more people using different ISPs. New chat clients were introduced that could communicate with these people such as ICQ, Yahoo IM, and MSN.
I picked up ICQ next because, at the time, it did things that no other client was doing: file transfers and live VOIP. Of course, file transfers were broken, with dial-up only compounding the problem, and VOIP wasn’t exactly real-time or usable in any realistic form, but they were new features that, when they did work, made the internet that much more intimate.
Of course, none of these IM programs could interact with one another, so people created products like Trillian, which worked to an extent, but faked a lot of what they were trying to do and broke way too often to be usable beyond a novelty. As time passed, however, these programs became more refined and offered a one stop shop for all your instant messaging.
For awhile I stuck with basic AIM and MSN. I’d stopped using ICQ, put Yahoo IM to bed, and turned away from all in one programs, prefering whatever AOL and Microsoft provided. But as my computer aged and I stopped upgrading, I decided to squeeze out any little bit of RAM I could, so I downloaded a program called Pidgin.
Pidgin was actually a great program on Windows and did everything I needed it to do, but it was still clunky and a little broken in the file transfer department. I simply couldn’t get it to work the way I wanted it to. I was scared that when I migrated to OSX finding a good all in one solution would prove problematic.
If you’ve read any of my earlier confessions, you’ve come to find that I’m usually always wrong with my original assumptions about OSX and the applications I’d find for it. Suffice it to say, I was wrong about all in one chat programs on the platform. Not only did I stumble upon a good chat program for OSX, I stumbled upon the, in my humble opinion, best chat program the internet has to offer. Adium is the end all for me and unless they discontinue updates, I will never need to use another program for as long as I live.
Adium is one of those all in one programs that does everything you want it to do. You can edit every aspect of the program, including your picture, your friends’ pictures, their profiles (to add notes about them you’d like to remember) and more. File transfers are a simple drag and drop process, with the file shooting off through the information superhighway without a hitch. And the amount of customization in the way Adium looks, feels, and responds is also endless. Additionaly, by downloading Growl (which also works for loads of other programs, by the way), users can set their IMs to instant onscreen notification, which has been both a blessing and a bane for me. Because I don’t pay enough attention to what’s happening on my screen sometimes, I’ll start typing a response to the Growl notification without realizing that I’m responding to someone else instead of the proper recipient.
If standard Adium isn’t enough for you, there’s a full fledged community dedicated to themes, sounds, and plugins to expand the Adium user experience. Really, what more could you ask for?
I don’t think I’ll need another chat client for as long as I live. Adium serves every purpose that I could possibly throw at it. Maybe OSX really is the holy grail of application development.
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