14 DAY TRIAL // Adium is a free instant messaging (IM) client for Mac OS X users, which replicates to great extent pretty much all the features (and the look) of Apple's own IM client, iChat. Adium has reached version 1.3 recently, adding a ton of new features and enhancements.
Adium combines an array of IM protocols such as AOL Instant Messenger (including ICQ and .Mac), Jabber (including Google Talk), MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger (including Yahoo! Japan), Bonjour (compatible with iChat), Gadu-Gadu, Novell Groupwise and Lotus Sametime. The free IM client gives you the possibility to connect with multiple types of accounts at the same time, combining all your friend groups into one big list. The program also sports a Mac-like appearance, which makes it blend perfectly with Aqua. You can also customize the look and feel of Adium to great extent.
Major changes occurring with Adium 1.3, according to the developer, include a complete redesign of the Contact Inspector, a new search field in the Standard Contact List window, a Facebook Chat service, the switch to MSN-Pecan and some "major performance improvements". Details on each, as revealed by the changelog, are available after the break.
Complete redesign of the Contact Inspector (formerly the Get Info Window) - Complete interface overhaul - Profiles for combined contacts now display in a unified fashion - Combined contacts' contents are now managed in the contact list; they automatically expand in the contact list when inspected - Increased buddy info retrieval speed - Fixed management of serverside group associations from the Contact Inspector.
Added Facebook Chat service to Adium - Known limitation: logging into Facebook Chat via Adium will log you out of the Facebook website)
Added a search field to the Standard Contact List window - this can be accessed either from the Edit menu (⌘F) or by blindly typing into contact list (the previously-existing type-ahead find feature).
Switched to MSN-Pecan, a new MSN library for libpurple. Notable changes with MSN- Pecan:
- Support for personal messages - Improved error handling for networking issues - Improved http method support.
Major performance improvements, most notable when signing on multiple accounts simultaneously and when chatting while other applications are making heavy use of your hard drive.
According to the developer, "tons of improvements and fixes, big and small" are included in this release. For the curious, and also for those who wish to download their new version of the free IM client for Mac (10.4 or later) click here.