MacAppZone

Adium: Powerful Instant Messaging

November 13th, 2009 by Erik Bernskiold

Adium is an instant messenger client that has grown to be the most widespread on the Mac. It has got support for many different chat protocols and being open source, is themeable and extenable using extras that can be downloaded.

 

The Interface

The interface of Adium by default is quite bland and boring. It looks like an open source application that hasn’t got all that much thought into the UI, cluttered at times. By installing themes on your own that are available from their website, you can make the application look a lot better.

In the screenshot below of the contact list, the theme “Stockholm Black” is installed with the contact list setting to “Group Bubbles”.

Protocol Support

The amount of protocols that Adium support is extensive. Everything from MSN, AIM and Google Talk to Facebook, LiveJournal and the old ICQ are in there. You can have as many accounts as you want, even multiple ones from the same service (say, two MSN accounts).

The Missing Parts

While Adium overall is a very solid client for instant messaging, it does lack two really major features. Video and audio! Continuing the trend that Microsoft set with its crippled MSN client, Adium supports neither video conversations nor audio conversations.

If you use a service like MSN where a lot of your buddies have video (and audio) chat and you want to talk when them, I suggest you take a look at another application. Adium will not be for you.

Wake up Adium team. Video needs to make it into the application, especially before any other application (that works as good as Adium overall) does it!

Address Book Integration, Status Messages, Notifications

You have full control over away and status messages as you would expect and auto responders are available when you set up a new message. These work independently of the protocol you are using and can be used on all your IM accounts.

Integration for notifications with the very popular Growl plugin for your Mac, makes notifications great. You can choose which types of notifications you want to get (example: contact logs on, new message) and when the event occurs, a Growl bubble will pop up on your screen.

It can also integrate right into your address book, pulling contact names from there to use as contact names in the list, if you have in address book, added for example the MSN username for that contact. If you have a lot of contacts and don’t want to bother with the changing display names, just use the contact names from your address book!

Conclusion

Adium is a very solid system for instant messaging, providing you with all the protocols you need (Skype of course being an exception) in an interface that with a little tweaking, looks good and works for daily use.

The lack of video and audio support is a big minus for the app even though it is fully free to download. It makes the experience still feel very crippled.

All in all, if you need a solid instant message client that can handle multiple protocols (or even if you use a single protocol), do give Adium a try. It is the best client there is on the Mac right now, based on an overall experience.