Well, I’ve spent that last week using Adium. As I have said before, I wasn’t exactly the biggest fan of the 0.7 builds so I met 0.8 with a bit of skepticism. However, that was soon gone. By far the biggest improvement in this version is the preferences screen. It has been completely re-designed and no longer resembles the mess of the 0.7 era. Everything is laid out nicely meaning that you can now access many of Adium’s great features without pulling your hair out.

Now the most important thing about Adium is that it is multi protocol. I’ve been using it with AIM and MSN but you can also use it with Yahoo, Jabber and many more. It takes a while to get used to and to integrate your contact lists (I had groups all over the place) but after you have done it you finally get to appreciate how nice it is having one application instead of two or more. The ability to customise the appearance has always been a strong point for adium and this version is no exception. After about 30 minutes of playing around with all the settings I finally got my contact list and IM windows looking how I wanted.

The contact list is also improved and while you can change the appearance to many different styles, I stuck with the standard style as it allows easy access to status changing and let’s me resize the window. I’ve managed to set it up to look similar to iChat, with the icons on the left and the status under the name. But there are also two minor things that make life much more pleasant. You can have the contact list show which service your friends are using and there is also an extra status for mobile users (with iChat you have to hover over and get a tooltip to see if they are on their mobile. There is also a very nice chat log system built in which let’s you view your past chat’s without the need of a 3rd party app (or wading through the file system).

One of the features that many people rave about adium having and complain about iChat not are tabbed IM’s. Now while some people may like them, i feel that the concept is flawed, as IM’s are live content and therefore shouldn’t be tabbed. In my opinion having tabbed IM’s is as useful as having tabbed quicktime windows. I tried it for one night but it got so irritating that by the next morning I’d switched it off and gone back the the better multi window approach.

Now the status and event systems in Adium are far superior that those of any other chat client I’ve seen. While the status system is similar to iChat, it allows you to customise when you get seen as Idle or Away and also let’s you set a status message for when you use fast users switching (iChat 3 lets you choose from “Away or “Offline, while Adium lets you choose any status). The event system let’s you customise what Adium does when a certain even happens, for example a friend logging in. You can set it up to play sounds, run applescripts, edit the dock icon or even send a message to the growl notification system. Just a word of warning, you may want to switch from the Adium default sounds to another set because they are extremely irritating.

With all these great features you may be heading over to the Adium site right now to download it. Well I suggest you wait because there is a downside to Adium too. With AIM, Direct Connecting to a user allows you to send inline images, PDF’s etc and also transfer files. Adium doesn’t do this well and in the whole week I’ve been using it I haven’t managed to get a single successful connection. Instead I’ve had Adium crash. This many not phase some people but it annoys the hell out of someone like me, who is constantly sending files. And it isn’t just AIM that’s affected MSN and Yahoo also have problems with file transfer. In all fairness though it isn’t Adium’s fault for these being poor, it’s more the lack of support for unofficial clients on IM services.

Another thing that may bug people is that Adium has absolutely no support for Audio or Video chats (though it is planned for the future). This means that you’ll have to keep switching back to iChat to see or hear all your friends, which kind of defeats the point of a multi protocol app. The last, though somewhat minor, annoying thing about Adium is that I can’t seem to find any way to group offline contacts. The feature is either not there or is very well hidden, but either way it’s a bad thing.

So it comes down to what score to give to Adium. Well 0.8 has certainly turned my view of Adium around. I set the goal, of if Adium manages to get me to remove one of my IM apps from my dock it would get a minimum of 4/5 and if it got both out it would get 5/5. Well aMSN is gone but iChat stays. Despite what many people say, iChat is still a better AIM client than Adium. Maybe by version 1.0, if they manage to get file transfer sorted and add audio/video chats, iChat’s days will be numbered. So I hereby give adium the very respectable score of 4 out of 5.

-Pilky