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Adium’s support for tabbed IM windows doesn’t end there though. Which looks better to the boss… 10 IM windows or one? I’d probably fire someone if I saw 10 IM windows on their screen all day. If you’re an IM whore like me, you may often have 10 IM windows up on your desktop during any given workday.

Adium also pioneered tabbed chat windows.

Adium can be configured to fade in Growl alerts upon almost any event.

OS X does not have such a notification system built-in, but an add-on called Growl enables this functionality and in a much more beautiful and customizable way than Toast. Whenever an application wants to notify you of something, it can pop up a Toast message from your taskbar. Those of you in the Windows world have this nice little built-in system notification called Toast. Adium not only lets you lump everyone into the same pool but it also allows you to combine contacts with multiple IM accounts into one contact by simply dragging and dropping. If you want to then group by “Work, Family, Friends, etc.” fine.

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What IM service someone uses yields no logical information about how to classify them as a contact so you’re really better off putting everyone in the same pool. Even when I used Fire (another multi-protocol IM client), I liked to separate all of my contacts out by IM service, but then I realized this practice is pretty pointless. The ability to combine contacts from multiple services is brilliant.I use the built-in “Plastic” theme (shown also to the right) which features subtle shadowing and rounded corners. Adium also lets you customize the look of your message windows.My personal favorite is “Decay” (shown to the right), which combines a nice transparent black chromeless window with Kottke’s space-efficient Silkscreen typeface. Adium lets you choose from hundreds of design themes, almost all of which are better than what MSN, Apple, and Yahoo force upon you. I hate Yahoo’s 1993 design sensibilities. First and foremost, Adium offers a beautiful customizable interface.

Here are some particularly nice examples: How does it look on screen? How does it react to certain clicks and drags? How does it alert you? How customizable is it? These are the very things Adium excels at. Most programs these days can do the big tasks correctly, or else no one would use them, but the true test of a great app is how it handles the little things.

#Adium supplement software

I’d tried Adium in the past but found it too riddled with bugs and incompatibilities for everyday use, but I’m happy to report that as of version 0.81 (can I get a 1.0 please? have some confidence in your product!), Adium is most clearly the best instant messaging client in existence, and dare I say, one of the nicest pieces of software I’ve ever used.

#Adium supplement mac

Over the last two weeks, I’ve finally discovered something hundreds of thousands of Mac users already know about: Adium.Īdium is a multi-protocol Instant Messaging client which lets you connect to all of your peeps on MSN, iChat, AOL, Yahoo, Jabber, and a few others. Have you noticed me bugging you a lot over Instant Messenger these days? If so, you’re not alone.