Adium is a "Unique, third party AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) Client" written by Adam Iser, using Cocoa, for Mac OS X. It supports all the goodness (anti-aliased text, a Dock menu, lickable interface) you'd expect from a well-written Cocoa app, and plenty more. Here's why it's my current AIM client of choice:

  • It's customizable. Hoo boy, is it customizable. There are a grand total of 25 preference panes spanning everything from fonts and colors to icon bouncing to chat logging to message format. If you're willing to get your hands a little dirty you can add more Dock icons, sounds and emoticons such as those at http://www.ambitiouslemon.com/adiumxtras/. And perhaps most importantly, if you like eye candy like bouncing Dock icons, you can have it, but if you have a fairly slow processor or are trying to do many things at once, it can also be reduced to a minimum.
  • It's efficient. When I run top on my 400MHz iMac, it shows Adium's CPU usage to be next to nothing when I'm not actively using it, and under 20% for a conversation with a single person.
  • It's got a great interface. The window mode I use is as follows: one window for the buddy list, one window with tabs for each ongoing conversation. This is a great alternative to the potentially cluttered one-window-per-conversation interface used by other clients like iChat. As with most other things, in Adium you have your choice between the two. Besides this, Adium's interface is just very clean and well-done: attractive yet simple and functional, in my opinion the epitome of what an Aqua app should look like.
  • It's free. At this point it kind of has to be in order to compete with the scads of other free AIM clients, but nevertheless for a college student like me any free software of this quality is very much appreciated. Adium is also open source, and is distributed under the GPL. There is an alternate version, with several features added by people in the Adium community, available on VersionTracker.
  • It's got good support. There is a forum at http://www.adiumx.com/forum.html, frequented by the developer himself, where Adium users can ask questions and suggest features.

There are some features missing from Adium, though. It uses the OSCAR protocol, so you can't transfer files with it. Blame AOL for that one. Also, it doesn't have the tight integration that iChat does with other Apple-made "digital hub" apps like Address Book and Mail. In my opinion, these are small prices to pay; I used iChat for awhile shortly after Jaguar was released but came back to Adium when I grew tired of the iCandy that iChat has in place of true customizability.


Adium's current version number is 1.6.2c. It can be found at http://www.adiumx.com/. All development efforts seem at this point to be focused on version 2.0, which is expected to enable file transfer and to support plugins. Version 2.0 is still alpha; you can obtain the source code via CVS (you'll have to build it yourself) from the Adium project on SourceForge at http://sourceforge.net/projects/adium. Finally, the community-developed "alternate version" of Adium (version 1.6.5.03, sheesh) is available on VersionTracker at http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/16274.

Adium (rhymes with Vanadium) is a multiple-protocol chat client for Mac OS X. It is based off of gaimlib (the library with which the popular X11/Windows chat client Gaim is written), and as a result shares just about everything that is good about gaimlib, as well as incorporating a number of features that chat users have come to expect, hope for, or just plain enjoy.

Adium supports every major chat protocol, as well as several minor ones. The list to date:

Adium is designed to be extensible and customizable. The buddy list, message windows, and many other parts of the interface are highly customizable, as new themes (or "Xtras", as the Adium team refers to them) are created using a relatively simple and comprehensible combination of XML and CSS, and (for the less code-inclined) the program provides an interface for editing downloaded themes to a minute degree, down to (in some cases) pixel-by-pixel spacing and coloration. Because the message window format is effectively just modified HTML, anything that a clever person can do with HTML, CSS, and Javascript is possible in a message theme, meaning that a lot of eye candy is done cleanly and effectively by a minimal amount of code. In this way, Adium is actually doing something that very few other chat clients have done, and taken modularity to another level entirely.

In addition, alerts can be added for just about any action taken by any person or group of persons that you have in your contact list. These can range from simple Dock-bouncing, to sound effects, to creating Growl notifications, to running AppleScripts.

The possibilities given to the theme designer are quite a lot more varied than those offered by any other chat client I know of. One could have the buddy list float on top of all other windows as a small, docked window, with everything wrapped in bubbles, exist as a streamlined part of the desktop with colors that accentuate the background picture, or be as generic as generic can be. I have seen message windows vary from clones of those of other chat clients up to a particularly eccentric one wherein all messages were in the form of sticky notes tacked to a corkboard, with buddy icons paper-clipped to the side.

Adium provides a website at www.adiumxtras.com for users to post, rate, and download Xtras. At the time of this writing, downloads exist in the following categories:

Adium is, of course, open-source. For a time it was hosted on Sourceforge, but has since moved to a server of its own. There is an extensive wiki for submitting feature requests, bugfixes, and other tidbits. The Adium team is quite open to coders submitting patches to the Adium codebase.

Adium was first released in 2001 by Adam Iser, who was at the time a simple college student, and who has since stayed on as lead developer and cow enthusiast. When it reached the point of becoming Adium 2.0, it was instead renamed to Adium X, and the version-numbering restarted. As of this writeup's current revision, the program is at version 0.89.

The Adium duck is central to the program's lore, as well as being its mascot. Hunting through the site will turn up the occasional tidbits about how the duck started life as a poorly-done drawing of some other bird, but who are we to question the duck?

If you are a Mac user, you should really try Adium. Just about the only feature that it does not yet support is audio and video chat, and you might be better off trying a program like Skype for that anyway. It's fast, customizable, and supports just about anywhere that could have given you a screen name. It also has a duck.


Links:

  • The main website: http://www.adiumx.com
  • The Xtras website: http://www.adiumxtras.com

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