As much as it pains me to admit this so unequivocally, the Frog was right. I’m referring to the MacOS multi protocol messenger, AdiumX. This product is simply amazing. Everything is infintely customisable and tweaking it into the perfect, unobtrusive IM client that still provides the necesary notifications is not only possible, its made to look gorgeous at the same time.
If anyone out there is using a Mac and IM without AdiumX then you are missing out big time. Like the Frog said in his own post, Fire was good, but this is so much better.
Now if only there was a linux equivalent that was even in the ballpark.
the frog says:
Of course the frog was right!! 🙂
AdiumX is backed by libGaim, so in a functional sense Linux has it. However, there is something about Adium that just doesn’t seem to exist in Gaim. I put it down to the differences in focus for developers on each platform. Mac OS applications have always had this feeling of quality and craftsmenship where it is rare to find in the Linux world (where the focus is on functionality generally to the exclusion of form).
noisymime says:
Well really, AdiumX is nothing more than a front end for GAIM’s IM protocol framework. So while the backend may exist in the linux version of GAIM, the interface for it sucks the big one, especially compared to AdiumX.
Granted the application interface provided by OSX does make it much easier to create polished apps, full of nice eye candy, but even so, much of this could be moved to GTK or QT without too many problems, just minus a few effects.