So, I have been playing with IM a little this weekend, trying to reconcile the many IM accounts I seem to have acquired recently (mostly with something else). I now have a Google Talk IM for work use, my Yahoo! account that I’ve been using for a long time, my GizmoProject account and a test account I setup at Jabber.org (though I don’t use that for much). I also wanted to play with iChat‘s video conferencing.
But how to deal with all these different IM systems without running them all (if that was even an option, which it is not since Google haven’t learnt to support Linux and Mac OS X yet).
So, on my Linux box I am using Gaim. It works, though it is not exactly the most advanced client out there. On the Mac though I found Adium X. Now this is cool, and yet more evidence of how far Linux desktops have to go before they come close to Mac OS. It looks good and it works well. Gaim works OK, but does not have the looks of Adium X.
Finally, I used the iChat video conferencing system for a trans-Atlantic video conference and it worked pretty well. Was a little fussy getting connected once or twice (gave a very strange error message saying I didn’t respond when I was the person initiating the call), but when it worked the video looked good and the sound worked using the builtin mic & speakers (no headset needed).
the underlying engine in adium is gaim, though …
Interesting; I have had lots of problems with Gaim dropping connections and having to reconnect, but Adium X has not done that to me yet. The biggest difference for me though is the UI – Adium has a very simple, clean interface. Only odd thing about it really is the strange sound effects that come with it.
Gaim is OK, but just seems a little less polished in UI terms. As an example, my buddy list in Adium X is in the bottom left corner of the screen, and set to auto-size vertically. It knows to grow up and not down where it would cover the dock. I didn’t tell it that; I just asked for auto-sizing and it did the rest. It also takes up a lot less screen space than the Gaim buddy list.
Hi sorry for writing this in the comments but I couldn`t find your email address on the site,
You have been kind enough to link to my blog Undercover in Japan in
your blogroll.
I have recently changed domains from http://quaisi.blogspot.com to
http://quaisi.net. I would really appreciate it if you would update
your link on your site to the new one
Thanks and keep up the good work,
Simon
—
Undercover in Japan
http://quaisi.net
Have you tried trillian?
It seems from the Trillian home page that it only supports Windoze, so that is not something I will be using (I don’t run Windoze, only Mac OS X and Linux).