Why did you chose Adium X over the other programs?????

Nomster · Post by **Nomster** » Wed Jun 01, 2005 5:06 pm

It finally got decent support for meta contacts and multiple im networks

biglittledragoon · Post by **biglittledragoon** » Wed Jun 01, 2005 5:23 pm

It is by chance that I knew Adium. I sought the equivalent with Trillian. I have DL several applications. I opened Adium in first, and since I keeped it.

With all the good reasons which you said, I want to add one, very important to me.
Adium is free. And I do not speak only about the price, but about the state of mind (GNU GPL)...

kirk · Post by **kirk** » Wed Jun 01, 2005 5:43 pm

My reason:

Because it is awesome.

'Nuff said.

andru_911 · Post by **andru_911** » Wed Jun 01, 2005 7:20 pm

Simba Cub wrote:Was using Proteus but nowerdays it's updated rarely if at all.

I'm just not comfy with it.

Rich::

agree with that first part...just waiting for a few features in adium before i forget proteus all together.
the metal version of adium was a huge seller. would love a pro/unified version ala mail 2.0 (yes i think it looks rather sexy, lynch me if you must).
and as someone mentioned before, the forums are lively and devs are very helpful, or at least to the point...
still not sure about the duck...i guess it's like crack, good in small doses...

michael · Post by **michael** » Wed Jun 01, 2005 7:47 pm

Adium is unified now try the svn or the beta

OmniGeno · Post by **OmniGeno** » Wed Jun 01, 2005 7:55 pm

I started using Adium back in the 1.5.1 days, when I realized how clunky and bloated AOL's AIM was, and also wanted to escape the annoying ads in the official client. That earlier version of Adium was so much slimmer, more streamlined, and a lot faster than anything else at the time.

Now I use Adium because I can customize it up the wazoo and it just feels and looks better than regular AIM. No, I don't really use it for any other services (MSN, Yahoo, etc). I can make Adium as unintrusive as I want it to be, or flashy and stylish, or both. People come over and see my buddy list and say "whoa, what program is that?" and I say "Oh, that's my AIM client." And to that they say "Oh, that's cool! How come mine can't do that?"

But anyway, I don't use it to amaze my friends; I use it because it's more robust, customizable, and sleeker than the average bear. Great work, Adium team!

dimebagmatt · Post by **dimebagmatt** » Wed Jun 01, 2005 8:14 pm

I used Mac Messenger when i had OS 9, which was fair enough, but when i got OSX i wanted an actually attractive messenger

, Fire sucks, Proteus begs you for donations, and has quite a few bugs, and Adium does everything i'm after!!!

ive never really had any problems with it, and i love the huge amount of addons available.

Oh yeah, don't even consider getting AMsn if you have a G3 or something old like that, its a huge CPU hog lol, even though it does offer webcam....meh...get Adium

andru_911 · Post by **andru_911** » Wed Jun 01, 2005 9:00 pm

michael wrote:Adium is unified now try the svn or the beta

i know

just waiting for those shiny buttons...plus i'm liking the metal version still

michael · Post by **michael** » Wed Jun 01, 2005 9:31 pm

andru_911 wrote:i know just waiting for those shiny buttons...plus i'm liking the metal version still

Pfft. Metal is soo 10.3.9

ravijo · Post by **ravijo** » Wed Jun 01, 2005 10:24 pm

I'm a former iChat user. I love iChat still, but it really became an issue as to how long I could hold out not talking to my MSN friends. I tried convincing THEM to come to multi-protocol, but that didn't work. I had originally used Proteus (back in the Justin Wood days) and loved it. Then my friend got me on iChat, I saw when Adium then went multi, and was interested.

But I mainly was convinced I should switch when I saw that file transfer was possible, albeit sketchy.

iChat I think is still completely awesome in it's own "territory" of AIM, but I really can't NOT talk to my MSN buddies any longer.

Plus... that crazy duck told me to burn things!

ion · Post by **ion** » Wed Jun 01, 2005 11:44 pm

I use it because it allows me to log into different services and on more than one account, I like how custumizable it is, I like the user interface and its free. Honestly I don't believe in paying for an IM client.

notyourstar · Post by **notyourstar** » Thu Jun 02, 2005 6:37 am

i could be on more than one sn at once
font colors
talking while away
aliasing
logging
tabbing
the amazing extras
visual customizations

should i keep going??

Post by **cbarrett** » Thu Jun 02, 2005 10:33 am

Heh, this is an interesting topic. Before I ask you guys some questions, I'll talk about how *I* found Adium. I downloaded Adium 1.4 at the behest of my current girlfriend, and started chatting with Adam Iser sometime around the release of 1.6. I started working on Adium when Adam started "Adium 2.0" over on sourceforge. And the rest is mostly history.

Alright, so my question to you is where does this "Adium is customizable" meme come from? It's not on the website, it's not anywhere. Where do you guys get it! Adium's real 'spirit' is one of experimentation. Remember the optional dock bouncing? Status circles? Tabbed messaegs? All the other crazy experimental features we had back in the day?

So, anyways, look for Adium to get back on the leading edge of experimentation in coming versions

Frankly, I'm really, really excited about it. It's like nothing ever seen before in an IM client. It's gonna be amazing.

Post by **Catfish_Man** » Thu Jun 02, 2005 10:58 am

I used Adium 1.6.x for a while, forget how I found it; a while later, while I was using iChat, I heard about the Adium 2.0 project a few times, and had a look. I started using it a bit before 0.5, and also worked on a project that used some code from it (AICustomTabsView and dependencies). At some point along the way I decided there was a feature I wanted (the "don't show message history if the window was closed <5 minutes ago" feature, although I really wasn't expecting it to be a pref), and came to the IRC channel to ask about a few things that were confusing me in the code. After that I ran into Samsamoa and got recruited for Myko, and then got more into Adium development writing stuff to support that. As for why I use Adium... I'd say there are three main reasons:
A lot of it is just because unlike most programs, when I see something that I think could be better, I can go try to make it better, and a lot of times someone else will be willing to help.
Another is the focus on doing things the Right Way®, which is enhanced by not having any particular release schedule. A good example of this is the event preferences. We've redone them... I dunno, 5 times? And yet we're still working on improving them (NSButtonCell is thwarting my attempts right now, though

).
There are others too (I just like using the app, mostly due to simplicity and staying-out-of-my-way-ness, and I like the community, particularly the IRC regulars).

Rita · Post by **Rita** » Thu Jun 02, 2005 2:04 pm

cbarrett wrote:Alright, so my question to you is where does this "Adium is customizable" meme come from? It's not on the website, it's not anywhere. Where do you guys get it! Adium's real 'spirit' is one of experimentation. Remember the optional dock bouncing? Status circles? Tabbed messaegs? All the other crazy experimental features we had back in the day?

For me, the cusomization comes from the built in options of how I can make the contact list look, the way I can change the appearance of the message windows, to include the buddy icon on my contact list or not, etc., as well as all of the fun stuff people have uploaded onto adiumx(tras). Even without the xtras, adium is FAR more customizable than the official AIM client. (I never used another program, so I can't speak to those.) In the official client, the best I could do was change font appearance. But you guys have given us so many more options. It makes my computer (and me) very happy.

Even though it's not advertised, the second anyone starts playing around with their settings, it becomes pretty obvious that you can turn adium into the program *you* want it to be.

As for the new stuff you guys are working, I'm so excited to see it. You guys have done an awesome job with the program and I'm sure it will only get better!

port80 · Post by **port80** » Thu Jun 02, 2005 6:39 pm

Well, I started on Adium 1.X back in the 10.1 days, when everyone I knew was using AIM. Over time, however, I ran into a few people who started using Yahoo. This was around the same time that the Adium 2.0 project (now AdiumX) was starting to release source code. At that point, Adium 2.0 wasn't really ready for prime time, so I sampled the other multi-protocol clients out there.

Proteus: Proteus was a pretty nice client when I started using it (version 2?), but it was shareware at the time, and I've always been a cheapskate when it comes to software. I really didn't want to drop money just to talk to a handful of Yahoo contacts.

Fire: Fire is all right, but it ate up quite a bit of screen real estate (I'm on a iBook), and never really did all that much to impress me. But it was free, and it worked with AIM and Yahoo, and so I used it for a while. If Adium went away tomorrow, you'd probably find me using Fire.

Adium 2.0/AdiumX: When the nightly builds of Adium started getting usable, I gave it a try again and got hooked. At the time, it was just marginally better than the other options out there - it talked to all the protocols I needed, and it didn't take up that much screen space, and it was free, and it didn't crash too much. At that point, that's really all I could say for it.

These days, however, Adium has acquired a few features which make it stand head-and-shoulders above everything else. If I was a new Mac user today, here are the two big features that would sell it for me:

OTR Encryption: I'm a bit of a security nut. All my e-mails are signed (and encrypted where possible), Filevault and secure memory are turned on, and I run Snort alongside the built in firewall. (Reading the RISKS digest and the ISC Handler's Diary will do that to you.) For years, I was always frustrated at having to move IM conversations into e-mail if I wanted to use encryption. OTR is the first encryption scheme for IM that I've seen that works seamlessly, and Adium's implementation is even smoother than gaim's - a pretty impressive accomplishment, considering OTR was originally released for gaim!

Contact List: Remember that I said I was using an iBook? When you've got 60-some contacts on your contact list and a 1024x786 display, nothing beats being able to render your contact list in 9-point type as a transparent overlay on your desktop. Enough said.

Of course, Adium's got a whole host of other handy features - Growl integration, GPL licensing, metacontact support, per-contact event support, automatic logging - but to a degree, you can find those in other IM programs. Having them bundled alongside encryption and good contact-list customization makes Adium the best IM client I can think of on any platform.

Cheesechick · Post by **Cheesechick** » Thu Jun 02, 2005 11:37 pm

I use it for the customization mostly.

mkalus · Post by **mkalus** » Thu Jun 09, 2005 6:51 am

I used fire for quite some time as I didn't really like the original clients.

Having come from a Unix Background, Fire was okay, it did the job, albeit it was butt ugly.

So when I found AdiumX I liked it, it was sleek, very Mac OS X feely and I switched.... Never looked back.

I still use the iChat client for Voice / Video Chat, but that's about it.