On Apple’s 300+ Leopard Features List, iChat earns the recognition of having the most new features in the list–24 to be exact. Although iChat 4 includes a nice series of new features for the AV crowd and some other new ideas, is the new iChat any better at just plain, old-fashioned text chatting? I spent a couple of weeks with iChat to find out.
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Tags: Adium, AIM, audio, chat, Chax, collaboration, features, Google Talk, iChat, iChat Theater, Jabber, Leopard Feature Presentation, Mac, Mac OS X Leopard, preview, Quick Look, recording, review, Screen Sharing, sharing, text, Video

Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is one of the oldest technologies for online chatrooms, used in particular by the open-source communities (I’m looking at you, #phpbb, #phpbb-mod, and #wordpress). However, the selection of clients for Mac OS X has been rather miniscule and pathetic, with the best being the venerable Colloquy. However, Colloquy has had its share of problems, including a number of bugs in the code, incompatibility with Safari 3, and a number of design quirks that I’ve not been happy with (honestly, I really LIKE seeing the whole channel topic, and don’t tell me otherwise!). Thankfully, I’ve recently discovered a new competitor for the Mac OS X IRC “market”, Linkinus. (Do all OS X IRC apps have to have weird names?)

Linkinus doesn’t contain that many “revolutionary” features, but it’s a very solid IRC client that takes advantage of the Mac OS X look and feel very nicely. It has a fairly iTunes 7-style interface, which very nicely lists the networks and channels on the left, but lists the users on the right, instead of in the same list (much smarter than Colloquy). You can choose different styles for the message window, so you can have your messages displayed in totally blinding style or a calmer plain style. One of the more ingenious features concerns my beef with the channel topic (see above). Instead of listing the full channel topic on the top or restricting it to just one line (like Colloquy does), it displays the channel topic in one line, but when you hover your mouse over the topic, it neatly scrolls the topic across, marquee style. That’s one of those eye-grabbing features which is really slick. Linkinus also includes support for the more advanced IRC features, including aliases/shortcuts (for example, I have /dfph to do “/me passes around the deep-fried pickle hearts” and /slap %1 to do “/me slaps %1 around a bit with a large trout”).

Overall, Linkinus is a very stable IRC client that works very well and has a very well-designed and well-thought out interface, which beats all the other OS X IRC clients out there. Colloquy is okay if you don’t want to pay anything, but if you’re a real IRC junkie, Linkinus is definitely worth the $20.

Final Rating:

Tags: chat, IRC, Mac, open source, review, Software

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