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Adium- Instant Messenger for Mac

Posted by: on Jun 18, 2010 | No Comments

Adium is a free instant messenger client, one of a short list of programs that I open on my Mac every time I use it. A huge amount of my day to day communication happens across the Internet now, Adium gives me a great way to combine all the various messaging services I use into one place. When setting it up you can add messaging accounts from a whole range of services, including MSN, Yahoo, Facebook and Google. Mine hosts contacts from my work/home Gmail, MSN and Facebook.

Another nice feature is the integration with Growl. For those that don’t know Growl is a notification system for MacOS, providing you with little pop-up messages in the top of your screen when various things happen. Alerts when a contact signs on for example, or a note to say you have a new message when Adium is in the background.

The Xtras directory for Adium is another major positive feature. It allows you to customise every feature of the program- from list styles and colours, through to icons and sound sets. Currently mine is set up using the Overture 1928 and Decay 2.0 display styles so I get a cool looking transparent set up that sits on my desktop without dominating screen space. See link here for a decent size screenshot.

My current Adium setup

Other nice things include file transfers, logging of chat history (and displaying this when you restart a conversation), and the ability to encrypt conversations if required. The one minor problem for us now we’re a Google Apps school is at the moment it doesn’t currently let you audio or video chat, but hopefully that will be coming soon.

Overall, great little app. Go download it here, and browse all the Xtras here.

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