A couple of years ago, I got my first experience with Adium, when it was still in perpetual beta development. Maybe I had an unlucky download or something like that, but it gave me a broken app that froze when opening. Obviously, I got rid of that pretty quickly.

But now, fast forward to about 5 months ago. Not only had I spent the year to year and a half prior to last March searching for an effective system for my e-mail management and a good web browser (the web browser review will be up in 11 days), but I was also looking for something to provide a good alternative to iChat rather clunky interface. I had given a bit of attention to Fire and Proteus, which are both products that are similar to Adium 1.0.x’s feature set, but really didn’t give me enough bang for my buck, not that I had given them any bucks to begin with. (Coincidentally, nowadays development on Proteus has been moot, and the Fire developers have given up and moved over to the Adium project themselves!) I ended up settling with iChat and Chax for quite a few months, which was a fairly good setup.

However, around March, some different things started happening. I started to have some more of my friends give me their IM names, and they didn’t use AIM; opting instead for other clients, in particular Yahoo! IM. (Incidentally, my username over there is selppafoniatnuof, which is fountainofapples spelled backwards because all of my other names were taken by some numchuck imposter! It’s pronounced “sell-puh-phone-eee-at-new-uv”.) I’m not a really big fan of Yahoo!’s own IM client, nor was I a big fan of dealing separately with iChat and YIM. I was also getting more Jabber/Gtalk contacts, and really didn’t like dealing with the two separate lists that iChat has for AIM and Jabber. It was time to get another solution.

Enter Adium. (Talk about a LONG intro for a review!) Ignore what I said in the first paragraph, I’m going to assume that something weird happened that day, because Adium is actually an AWESOME OS X chat application. It’s powered by the open-source libpurple framework (formerly known as libgaim), meaning that it’s compatible with AIM, MSN Messenger/Windows Live, Yahoo! IM, ICQ, Jabber, Bonjour, Google Talk, .Mac, Lotus Sametime, Novell Groupwise, QQ, Gadu-Gadu, and Live Journal Talk, all in the same application. Even better than that, it’s all in the same buddy list. And Adium packs a buddy list interface that is so similar to iChat, you could confuse it as iChat’s buddy list except for the lack of the brushed metal.

Adium allows you to setup and configure as many accounts under the supported protocols as you want, and log into them all at the same time (even multiple accounts under the same protocol, like multiple AIM screen names). The buddy list then allows you to add contacts (in my opinion, a better name for “buddies”) for those accounts. If one of your contacts has multiple accounts spanning multiple services, you can very easily combine them under one name: just drag and drop one contact listing over another to combine them. Plus, Adium provides you with a number of controls for customizing the contact list, allowing you to change window styles (do you like contact bubbles better?), color themes, list layout, and even the opacity (transparency) of the contact list. I don’t set any of these fancy things for myself, but what I personally do is stick the contact list on the lower-left corner of the screen and set it to automatically size the window vertically and horizontally so that it only takes as much space as is necessary to show all of my online contacts and their names.

There’s also many things that you can do to make Adium look more like iChat if you miss it. The iChat emoticons are there, as are the aqua bubbles, and Adium even comes with an iChat sound set (which I use because my parents don’t like the sound of the default Adium duck squawks that make the default sound set). Adium also allows you to set message styles to theme the chat windows (I personally use the Grey - Red variant of the built-in Stockholm style). And of course, Adium has an Xtras site where you can download additional customizations for the program. Oh, and how can I forget? The Adium chat window is very compact and automatically organizes itself into tabs–and just like the buddy list, you can snap it to a corner if you so choose. Adium also contains many of the other features that iChat and Chax have, including a really nice chat transcript viewer, custom status management (with iTunes display), etc.

The one thing that iChat has that Adium doesn’t have? You guessed it: audio/video conferencing. You will have to switch to another application for this, like iChat, however I’ve personally opted to use Skype for audio/video conferencing instead (but I’m not going to get into a full review of Skype here either).

Also, one of the most common gripes about Adium is that it doesn’t do file transfers right. This is partially true–the file transfers setup in Adium are not complete and are a bit buggy over AIM, however they do a lot better than they did, and tend to go through I’d say about 60-70% of the time. However, sometimes I get unlucky and do have to call up iChat to send that file through. In terms of receiving images and files from other people, they seem to go through about 80-90% of the time (although Adium does make a bit of a deal about accepting a direct connection, so it’s not as seamless as iChat is, but it still tends to work).

All in all, if you’re on multiple IM networks and managing multiple IM clients, you owe it yourself to close those down and give Adium a try. If you’re only using AIM/.Mac/Bonjour, and maybe throwing in Jabber/Google Talk, you might be a bit more comfortable in iChat, so long as you be sure that you’ve got Chax installed. However, Adium is by far the best multi-protocol IM client out there, and even includes a number of features that put a Chax-less version of iChat to shame (Apple will be playing “catch-up” this year by adding many of Adium’s features to iChat in Leopard). As a well-designed and well-engineered chat client by a dedicated team of open-source developers, Adium has a lot to bring to the instant messenger market.

If you’re on the Windows side, check out Pidgin. Although not created by the same team, and certainly not having as cool of a UI that Adium has, it’s still got most of the same features and is built on the same libpurple framework, and (in my humble opinion) one of the better IM clients in the Windows world.

Final Rating:

Tags: chat, contacts, friends, iChat, IM, Mac, review, Software