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Provides: Consolidated text chat for several services

Developer: Adium Team

Minimum System Requirements: Mac OS X v10.4, existing IM account

Price: Free

Availability: Out now

Adium is an Open Source, Mac-only application that allows you to wrangle several different instant messaging protocols into one convenient (and customizable) interface. It is ridiculously simple to configure, and has the intuitive, elegant interface that all Mac applications should have.

In the years I've been using a Mac, I've accumulated an obscene amount of e-mail addresses, log-ins, and identities, and with them, chat log-ins. In addition, I have friends who swear by different IM services (usually because most of their friends use it). Keeping in touch with them via online chatting is fun; however, the thought of running three or four different chat applications at once is a drag, not to mention the cluttering it does of my workspace. And then there's the issue of Gmail Chat, which requires me to be logged into my Gmail account and have the window open; accidentally close the window, and it logs me out.

Fortunately, there's Adium, which supports Gmail (and other Jabber-based services like LiveJournal Chat), in addition to such popular services as AOL (and therefore, iChat as well as Bonjour), Yahoo!, MSN, and some of the more obscure choices.

Once you've installed Adium, setting up your accounts is a breeze: the application configures itself for the chat servers, and even accesses your "buddy lists" once you're logged on. You cannot, however, create an account from within Adium; that is to say, if you want to use Yahoo! Chat, you'll have to register with them first, then access it using Adium.

Another drawback to Adium is that it doesn't yet support Voice or Video chat. Transferring files can also be a bit tricky; the software underlying Adium isn't the same as the software used in the "official" IM clients, and may therefore not work as well (or at all).

But for text chat, and consolidating several protocols into one interface, Adium is great. There is a thriving community of developers who have created not only the application, but add-ons and customizations for it, giving users a wide range of styles. I myself use a tiny window to keep track of my available friends, with the transparency set to 67%, allowing me to see the desktop and applications running beneath it. Other users may prefer a more vibrant color, or perhaps something with a bit more personality, like a sheet of notebook paper.

The chat windows can likewise be customized in color and style, from an iChat-like interface to glowing greens and oranges of an old school command-line interface.

Finally, Adium stores your chats for easy reference (and indexes them using Spotlight). Users with privacy concerns can delete chats and/or disable the feature, and Adium supports "private" encoded chatting for some protocols.

Strengths: Free, elegant, customizable
Weaknesses: No video or voice chat. Transfers are buggy. Must already have account to use.

Bill's been using Macs since the late 80s. When he's not making smartass remarks to amuse Kirk Hiner, he enjoys fighting for the user.

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