Briefly About the Show

Many of you may be familiar with Adium already, but you may not have realized that the open source IM client just matured to 1.0 status recently. The 1.0 release offers dozens of enhancements and hundreds of bug fixes, possibly making Adium the best IM client around today on any platform.

Adium is unique because of the sheer quantity of protocols it supports coupled with an amazing amount of customization. You can go from the default contact list view to something quite your own with relative ease....

Because Adium has been around so long and has such strong community support, you'll also find hundreds of extensions, skins, icons, sounds, etc...

Add to all that a ton of necessary features like, OTR (encrypted chats), address book syncing, working file transfers, tabbed messaging, very slick message history, and that it works with Bonjour as well as dozens of protocols and you've got yourself the best IM client ever on the Mac.

Now if it only had video and audio chat support it'd really be amazing. Of course this is a long shot at best considering AOL, MSN, and Yahoo! don't open up their systems to let 3rd party applications use their audio/video services. There is some hope if you're a GoogleTalk user though. I think Adium is planning to do some work to tap into that system for audio, but I may be wrong on that. It's hard to confirm plans like these in an open-source project.

So if you've ever been hesitant to try Adium because it was pre-1.0, now's your chance. And if you're a big voice/audio chat user, you can always keep iChat or whatever around just in case, but let's face it... it's pretty rare for a majority of users.