Unfortunately, I have grown tired of the development cycle. The developers seem to be more interested in adding new marketed features than actually making the already present “features” work correctly. Some key features i.e. file transfers still do not work correctly, and the development team continues to blame GAIM for the lack of support, yet other apps that make use of GAIM such as Proteus work just fine.

I really hope that in a year or so when Adium hits a 1.0 release, many of these issues will be fixed. It really could be a beautiful app, if only it would just work.

People that discover Adium are usually intrigued with the face of the program, but little by little begin to be frustrated with its constant quirkiness and constant crashing. Trust me, little by little, you will begin to develop the love/hate relationship with this App. It may take a week, it may take a year. If your after an app that looks pretty, Adium hits the nail, if your after an app that works correctly and consistently, Adium falls short by miles.

I definitely agree with what you’ve written, but have you given .81 a shot?

(Editor’s Note: Ah yes, so it does! Apparently you need to have your contact list in “regular mode” for this to appear. I have mine in “group bubble” mode so I don’t see the window chrome. It would still be nice for them to put the status in the bubble area so I can keep window chrome turned off. Thanks for the tip though.)

It’s a great app, but I agree with Josh about the love/hate relationship. I love the way it looks and I love the tabs, but I hate that something like file transfer is still seemingly not that big a priority to the developers.

The most recent version of Trillian would easily give it a run for it’s money (Windows ap). It supports every major (and a few minor) messaging protocols including IRC and has some crazy features.

My favorite of which is Wikipedia integration. Turn it on and if a topic in your chat is the title of a Wikipedia article it gets a dashed underline. Hover over it and you get the text of the Wikipedia article.

Most everything was working again, but file transfers over MSN still did not work for me. Some would start and then stop, others would complete slowly, and then others would just plain not work. When they do work, they work good, but it’s just that feeling of distrust that bugs me. I know that I cannot rely on the app, because the time that I really need it to work will be the time that it doesn’t.

I enjoy playing with software just as much as the next guy, in fact, probably more. But sometimes I just get tired of unexpected behavior and just want it to simply work. Even if it has slightly less features, I just want to use the app, not play with it.

As I said before, .81 was still giving me file transfer problems, there is also still a bug in its communication with keychain (i.e. entering saved passwords before the username is even entered!).

I was also getting a ton of display bugs in message views. Messages would be doubled in the message view even though they were only typed once until you typed something else, then it would correct itself. Artifacts of the display would be left behind, etc…

I probably only used .80/.81 final for a couple days, but after discovering that it still did not always behave, I searched for another solution. I love iChat, but since I am living in Canada for the moment, most of my Canadian friends use MSN, in fact a lot of them have never heard of AOL. But all my friends from Portland and Seattle, as well as all my family uses AOL, so I really needed a multi-protocol solution.

I gave the MSN through iChat a try, but again no file transfer support killed that option. As well, having two different buddy lists was kind of annoying.

I went and did a trial of Proteus, after not having used it since the 10.2 days, and was pleasantly surprised that not only did the app look stunning, but it worked! Everything I threw at it just worked, and that is priceless. I quickly paid for a registration and have been using it for a week now and love it. The only feature I am really missing from Adium is the combining of contacts with multiple IM addresses. Other than that, the app really has proved itself in my book.

I really love Adium, and the enthusiasm that surrounds the development. I am certainly not an Adium hater, I just wished that it worked better for me. I know that it will work perfectly for some, and I am really happy for those people, but until its more stable, I just can’t see myself sticking with it. I am really looking forward to the 1.0 release whenever that happens. I will continue to give each subsequent release a trial though, hoping that stability increases as time passes.

But I have a couple questions:

1. Will it work with my iSight?
2. Does it integrate with OS X’s address book, a la iChat?

Frankly, if it can’t do those two things, I doubt I’d switch, even though I’m definitely not enamored with iChat.

I created my own theme and all is transparent (using bubbles), so I only have the names of my contacts floating ordered in a corner in Argon Tight, a similar font to Kottke’s. Very useful, but still out of my way when working.

I believe Adium has been quite usable since they hit version 0.7.x (at least that’s when it replaced all IM apps for me) although it’s definitely improved a lot with the last two releases. Wish they included IRC as well, but I believe that’s not in the plans.

(Editor’s Note: That’s a nice little hack Heck! Added myself as a contact and now my status appears in the list. Still can’t change my status from there, but at least I can see it now. Cheers.)

Add all the IM addresses to a person’s entry in AB, and the grouping will be done automatically. You can also set options in Adium so that the name is that in the Address Book entry, and even tell it to automatically use the photo if you have one for that person.

/me loves being locked into the Apple trunk….

@ Joe Croft:
1) No, it will not work with your iSight. I would recommend creating a second AIM account and just leave your iChat open for that. If you’re limited on resources I suppose you could just open iChat when needed.
2) Yes, it integrates with OS X”s address book, but it takes things one step further: it groups a contact’s IM names. For example, if you have a friend, Joe, on your list, and he has 3 screennames online, it’ll show Joe one time on your list. When you send Joe an IM it allows you to choose which name to send it to.

I’m using .77, so maybe it’s changed… but right now, that’s my only complaint.

: )

I’m going to download it and check it out. There are definitely things I like about it, but not working with my iSight may be a dealbreaker. One more question. Does it (or any Mac IM client) support invisibility on the networks that have it (yahoo, AIM)?

@ Silus: The address book integration isn’t bad if you ask me, and hasn’t been for a few versions now. If you used iChat with your screenname you list will automatically be populated with the actual name of the person. If you have someone in your AB that you want added to your list you can select their name/screenname from a menu and add the contact that way. Very simple.