How is it that no one grabbed me and forced me to Adium sooner is beyond me. Adium is a wonderfully implemented multi-protocol IM client for Mac OS X. I 
found 
I’d been having some connection and stalling issues w/ Fire that prompted me to start looking again in the first place. I’ve been using Adium today and I’m very impressed. The app is very polished and well executed and the options make sense. Plus, it has tabbed chat windows, something I really missed from Gaim when I was on Windows all day.
My only complaint so far is the lack of a ‘none’ option for specific alerts (contact online/offline) in the custom sounds options. I only want an audio alert when I get an incoming message, and I want the initial audio alert sound (initiating a chat) to be different than the sound for an existing chat. Perhaps I’ll try my hand at making one if I can’t find a suitable option here.
Popularity: 2% [?]
Chris Pederick adds this Comment:
I have tried Adium, Fire and Proteus and I absolutely love Proteus.
Not sure what you mean by “pull in my buddy lists”, but I haven’t found it lacking any features that I need and find it a little more polished than Adium and Fire.
The developer of Proteus has now left to work for Apple on iChat, I believe, and the app has been taken over by others so we’ll see if it remains my favorite.
August 5th, 2004 at 6:07 pm
brian w adds this Comment:
I like Adium a lot but I think it’s suffering from preference-sprawl. It has gotten rather complicated and confusing since its OS 9 days. Once it’s tweaked just the way you like it, it’s great, but that can take a while.
As soon as Adium has file transfers & a menu bar item, I’m dumping iChat permanently.
August 5th, 2004 at 6:08 pm
Alex adds this Comment:
With Proteus I could log into my Yahoo and AIM accounts, but it didn’t retrieve my buddy lists from the servers. It seemed to want to maintain the lists.
August 5th, 2004 at 9:18 pm
Ryan adds this Comment:
Oh man have you been out in the dark. Adium has been floating about since the early days of OSX as a super lightweight AIM client.
Be sure to keep iChat or AIM around to do some file transfers. Adium isn’t too good at that yet.
Tabbed windows are great… especially on a PowerBook, all of a sudden there is a lot more screen space.
August 6th, 2004 at 1:09 pm
Chris Pederick adds this Comment:
Strange - I’ve never had a problem with it retrieving my buddy lists. I use Trillian on my PC and they both sync up just fine.
However, it does sound like Adium is catching up with features such as meta-contacts in future releases so maybe I’ll take another look in the future.
August 6th, 2004 at 3:07 pm
Derik adds this Comment:
Hey brian w, Adium actually does have a menu bar item (I think it might be on by default with 0.7 maybe).
October 25th, 2004 at 11:08 am