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I'm not a heavy user of online instant messanging, but I've used ICQ for years for communicating with family and friends. However, just about everyone on my list has for various reasons switched to MSN, and as with most Microsoft software, I'm not a fan of the MSN Messenger chat client, especially the OS X version, which seems particularly buggy. There are, however, alternatives, and this week I'm checking out the freeware Fire Cocoa chat client, which supports MSN along with several other Internet chat networks including AIM, ICQ, Jabber, and Yahoo! Pager. Fire is an multi protocol Internet instant chat client based on freely available libraries for each service. All services are built off of gpl'd libraries, including firetalk, libicq2000, libmsn, jabber, and libyahoo (linux libraries). Installation was simple -- just drag the Fire application from mounted disk image to the hard drive. I entered my MSN/Hotmail user name and password, and was online in a jiffy. I much prefer the Fire interface appearance to the Microsoftian looks of their MSN Messenger client. 
One off the nicest features of Fire is that it has attractively configured online Help, which is actually helpful, and makes intelligent use of the customary Cocoa slide-out drawer. Which is good, because I needed it in order to figure out how to add contact names to the "Buddy List." It was reasonably easy to do once I learned how, but the process could be more intuitive. 
Once set up, Fire works fine, and I have encountered no stability problems so far, which is more than I can say for the MSN Messenger client. According to the Fire developers, the level of support offered for the various services is as follows:
AIM support is "okay". You can send and receive IM's. You can participate in group chat.
ICQ
Features
Yahoo!
Yahoo! was the third protocol introduced to Fire. It appears to be relatively stable and functional
Features
MSN/Microsoft Messenger
MSN was the fourth protocol introduced to Fire. It is relatively stable and used by quite a few people.
Features
IRC/Internet Relay Chat
IRC was the fifth protocol introduced to Fire. It is relatively untested and works for me. This does not mean that it will work for you.
IRC will probably always be the least supported of the protocols, it's only here as a service for casual irc users. If you require true IRC usage ability, I suggest you get an irc client.
Features
Restrictions
Jabber IM
Jabber IM is the most recent addition to the Fire family. It is based on the jabber IM service present in the everybuddy application. This IS NOT a full Jabber client. It only allows discussions across the jabber network. There is no facility for other services on this network. If you know what this means, you know what this means.
Features
System requirements:
Fire is freeware
Chimera Re: OS X Odyssey 217 -- New Networking Troubles Odyssey 217-networking Slow Mouse and Slow Others; Dead AppleTalk Re: OS X Odyssey 218 - Which Is Faster - Chimera or Mozilla?
OS X Review From A Linux-users PerspectiveFrom Guy Teague Hi Charles:
There is a medium-length article here:
That you might enjoy looking through. Bottom line is this is a PC-based Linux-user who is given a top-drawer Mac G4 for a month and (my quotes) 'concludes that it's too slow!'. Last 'graf of part 2 is the conclusion referred to.
As I write this on a 3rd or 4th generation back, G4/733, it does not bother me one whit to pass on this article to you. I would no more give up the power and stability and versatility and command line of this Unix-based OSX and go back to the 'more responsive' OS9 than I would go back to CP/M. Over the last 2 days, I spent nearly 16 straight hours de-fragmenting, zero'ing out free space and reclaiming disk space in my Virtual PC virtual machines in order to try to shrink down the hard drive image sizes. This involved nearly maxing out my hard drive space, CPU use, and RAM. These background task ran continuously for nearly a full 16 hours. Meanwhile I was able to run all my normal apps and perform my daily tasks with this other activity in the background and the slowdown compared to operation without all the BG activity was nearly unnoticeable. And not one crash or restart needed. I can't even imagine this as being possible with OS9. If I had to perform the same task in OS9 (and I have in the past) it would have been 16 hours wasted since no other work could have been performed, no matter how powerful the machine. We have been waiting for this new OS for years and it is fulfilling its promise to those of us who have moved onwards and upwards. But you are doing a good job pointing out why this latest and greatest OS is not being adopted by everyone--hopefully someone with the ability to address your concerns is listening. /guy
Hi Guy;
Thanks for the link. The sentence how about the whole environment feeling like it's constantly playing catch up with his will sounds like something I could could have written myself, but I'm running on a 500 MHz G3. This guy is using a 1.25 GHz dual processor G4 Power Mac with all the bells and whistles. Is there any help?
That said, lately I've find myself staying in OS X for longer periods, but eventually my tolerance for the sluggish performance wears thin, and I reboot back into a OS 9.
Your multitasking anecdote is impressive, and you'll get no argument on that score from me. If I did that sort of stuff, OS X would be my first choice too. I'm wel aware of the Classic Mac OS's shortcomings and limitations, and have never argued otherwise. But it is, for stuff I'd do, a lot faster and more responsive, and adequately stable.
Charles From Andrew Nurse Charles, I've become a bit of a Chimera fan over the last few months a I'm convinced that this type of "clean" (as in uncluttered) browser is future of web browsing, or at least it should be. I've been having problems for the last few days with Chimera, however: it will only partially launch. It begins to start but the spinning coloured beach ball never goes away and the splash screen never transforms into the application. Any ideas on why this might be?
Take care
Hi Andrew;
I not sure what the problem might be. This is fairly early beta software. Try trashing the preferences and restarting. If that doesn't work, it might be worthwhile trashing everything and reinstalling the program. Let me know.
Charles Re: OS X Odyssey 217 -- New Networking Troubles From Jonathan Boyd Hi Charles, You should be able to fix the modem issue by going into System Preferences, Energy Saver, Show Details, Options and unchecking the wake when modem rings box. I notice that in your screen shot, when trying to connect to the Umax, there's a :* after the name - try removing that and you might be able to connect. In X, anything after a colon denotes the port that will be used to access the computer. That may be messing with the system. If the :* is part of the computer name, changing it may resolve the issue. If it does, then this isn't a problem with Mac OS X; it's just how Unix connects to computers. Incidentally, I find performance of 10.2.2 acceptable, albeit sluggish compared to 9 on my iBook 500, but a clean install on an old graphite DV iMac 400 with plenty of free hard drive space shows that it can really fly. Even with only 128 Mb RAM compared with 384 Mb in my iBook, Finder performance is significantly better on the iMac, menus snap open instantly, and I see no advantage in running 9. It would seem that a clean install and lots of free space do more good than a faster processor and lots of RAM. Can't wait to see the iBook fly after a clean install.
If you're still considering getting an iBook, I can honestly say you won't regret it. With the exception of a plug dropping on the LCD display (which cracked it, but still left the computer fully functional), mine has survived everything I've thrown at it - travelling round the country, getting caught in the rain (not recommended to anyone else), running up and down stairs with a DVD playing, being dropped off tables and chairs. As long as you don't throw anything at the screen, the computer is nigh on indestructible and any of the dual-USB variants, given a clean install of X, should perform quite nicely for you. The latest ones with Quartz Extreme enabled will absolutely fly.
Hi Jonathan;
Thanks for the tips and information. Someone else recommended checking in the Energy Saver preference, but when I did the boxes were not checked, so that is not it. Interestingly, even though I have not changed any settings, the PowerBook has not woken up through about half a dozen incoming telephone calls while it was asleep today. The only thing different is that I rebooted. Still a mystery.
I haven't a clue where the asterisks came from. They are not entered in the computer name.
Your iBook anecdotes are encouraging, if a bit horrific. You're a rougn man on machinery. ;-) I am still hoping to get one if I can get my head above water financially and health wise (not unrelated factors).
Charles
From Michael Snider Hello Charles. Regarding your networking problem--have you rebooted either machine since your last successful connection? If you have, and if either is getting its local IP address from a DHCP server, the IP address might be different. OS X sharing, even with Rendesvous on both machines, doesn't handle this in a graceful manner (at least not compared with traditional Appletalk)--when you choose a server from the pulldown menu, it tries to use the last known address and waits for almost 2 minutes to fail to find it. You can manually enter an IP address, or, if both machines are running 10.2, just click once in the field where servers appear and then Rendesvous will search and find the correct connected machines. You mentioned not long ago that the search button didn't appear in your Finder toolbar. It won't, except with a clean install of 10.2, unless you customize your toolbar and drag the button to the toolbar. Charles, you acknowledge that you need a bigger partition, but, failing that, it's time you did a clean install of OS X, using the Archive option and preserving user information. You won't lose anything but 3rd party patches to /Library; you'll gain space after removing the (old) system; you'll have a better baseline for judging OS X performance; and I'll bet you a quarter you get better and more consistent performance.
Best,
Hi Michael;
I have rebooted both machines a number of times since the last successful connection. I had no problems until I installed OS 10.2, and I can't recall for sure if I ever made a successful connection with the UMAX from OS X since then, but it's quite possible that I haven't. I run in OS 9 a lot, had just network with whatever is up at the time. I keep AppleTalk turned off unless I'm actually using it in OS 9 because it slows performance a biy and makes wakeup significantly slower.
Another reader clued me into the search bar thing yesterday.
I completely agree that a clean install would be ideal. The problem is that I don't think the Archive option will work with the less than a gigabyte I have free on The partition. I even had to jettison some optional stuff in order to get the 10.2.1 updater to run. I could just erase the partition and start from scratch, but that's a steep hill to climb in getting everything reinstalled and reconfigured. My time is at a premium these days. It may have to wait until I get a new machine.
Charles Slow Mouse and Slow Others; Dead AppleTalk From Danaë Hi Charles, Are you still one of the eleven people actually using Inkwell? If so, try turning it off and compare your mouse complaints to the change; we found that, while cool, Ink (or Inkwell; which is it, Apple?) hogged so much CPU time that it made normal mousing, menu ops, and accessing Open/Save dialogs considerably slower. Regarding your dead AppleTalk, have you tried manually entering the IP or AFP address of the UMAX (available from the FileSharing CP) directly into the Connect window of OS X? We've found that once in awhile the AT registries get goofed up, and tries to contact old "ghosts" of previously connected contacts (no longer at the same address); this happens especially when using DHCP, which, with just a crossover cable, you are undoubtedly using. You would be much happier if you were to manually configure your DHCP settings. You can also try clearing up the log jam by renaming each computer, and/or, creating a new location configuration and making it active on each machine; this will force it to look at the "new" ID info on each device. Usually, though, we can just "finesse" the current settings and make the connection. BTW, have you tried mounting volumes in both directions? Your articles indicate you've only tried to access the UMAX from the Pismo; what about the other way? Finally, in my experience, I would be quicker to blame OS 9 and a crossover cable for the problems than I would OS X; using a crossover has always been more flakey than having a hub or switch in between on legacy Mac OS. Please do yourself a favor and invest US$10 in a simple hub that will increase your connection reliability and also give you a set of LED lights for troubleshooting active or inactive Ethernet ports/connections. FWIW, our experience is that OS X is rarely that source of the AppleTalk issues in a mixed environment. That you can shift your Pismo back to 9 and make a reliable connection is not at all definitive proof that OS X is to blame; I'd bet dollars to donuts that if you rebooted the UMAX in OS X that you'd gain the same reliable connection again. But, since you state frequently you are unwilling to invest the time in that experiment, you'll never know, and you'll continue to make OS X the scapegoat. (; One last thing: what happened to your G4 upgrade you once had in the Pismo? On OWC, didn't you claim something to the effect of the "best money you've spent" or something like that. I tried to find that blurb again, but it seems to be gone now. Did you sell it, or did you never really buy it, and had to return the review unit? Not that your video bottleneck would be any different for Quartz Extreme, but a G4 makes a big difference for a lot of Quartz basics. Cheers
Hi Danae;
I haven't been able to get Inkwell to work so it is not turned on. The Inkbar resolutely refuses to appear. I have no idea why. I doubt that I would use it much anyway.
Thanks for the AppleTalk tips. I will try then out when I get a spare moment. I never had much luck getting the OS 9 computers to recognize the Pismo when it was booted from OS X, although they connect fine in OS 9. I haven't tried going the other direction for a while.
You're no doubt correct that having a Ethernet hub would improve reliability, but Van I ever had any connection reliability problems using just a crossover cable between OS 9 machines. Just another OS X angularity I guess. ;-)
Which makes me question your implication that the problem might be OS 9 or the crossover cable rather than OS X. This seems a curious analysis to me, given the trouble free nature of my experience connecting Macs with a crossover cable in OS 9. It may well be true that OS X 10.2 has problems with such a configuration that OS 9 doesn't (and that OS 10.1.x didn't for 10 months), but that's sort of my point, isn't it?
I'm not sure where you got the impression that I had a G4 upgrade card in the Pismo. Never have -- not even a review unit. I do think that at 300 dollars, the G4 Pismo upgrades our a reasonable value for the money, probably more so then most processor upgrades, but you're still stuck with 8MB of VRAM, and I'm personally more inclined to save my upgrade dollars for a more computer. I'm not aware of any quotes from me on OWC, but I have written some general commentary about PowerBook processor upgrades, so they may have pulled something from an article of mine (possibly out of context?).
Charles
Re: OS X Odyssey 218 - Which Is Faster - Chimera or Mozilla?
Curious that you didn't include Omniweb in your speed comparison of Chimera, Mozilla and iCab. Of course by the title of the article, your purpose for the experiment was to compare Chimera and Mozilla. iCab was just a bonus. Omniweb has been my favorite browser recently whether it's fastest or not. It has its flaws but I like it for its built-in spelling checker and the way it jumps a full page with the touch of the space bar (not nine tenths of a page like the other browsers). I could run my own speed tests, but it wouldn't be nearly as much fun as reading about you doing it.
Thanks for your interesting and informative articles!
Hi Dave:
Yes, actually I just included iCab since it was running out of curiosity and as sort of a control. The iCab version that I used wasn't even a public beta. I also didn't include Netscape or Internet Explorer.
I did do a similar shootout with seven OS X browsers last spring, including OmniWeb. You can find it in OS X Odyssey 135.
Charles
The OS X Odyssey archives may be accessed here: Note: Letters to Moore's Mailbag may or may not be published at the editor's discretion. Correspondents' email addresses will NOT be published unless the correspondent specifically requests publication. Letters may be edited for length and/or context. Opinions expressed in postings to Moore's MailBag are those of the respective correspondents and not necessarily shared or endorsed by the Editor and/or Applelinks management. If you would prefer that your message not appear in Moore's Mailbag, we would still like to hear from you. Just clearly mark your message "NOT FOR PUBLICATION," and it will not be published. CM
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