Tuesday, August 17th, 2004
Nitro, my current jabber client is now in hibernation. After dizzyd left the project it seems nobody is motivated enough to keep adding features. This is fine, as Adium is almost “gold” in my opinion. More on that later.
OS X has three really popular instant messengers that have multi-protocol support:
Fire
Proteus
Adium
It’s no coincidence that Apple has hired the creator of proteus (Justin Wood) and also the creator of fire (Eric Peyton) into the iChat divisions at Apple. They both created outstanding products. It’s unfortunate that the people now running proteus and fire aren’t showing any progress with their software.
Now steps in Adium. It currently has at least as many features as Proteus, and just a few less than Fire. With the .64 release rumored to have now only meta contacts (something that proteus and fire have had for some time) but also group chat support for Yahoo, MSN, AIM, and jabber. This means you will be able to accept invitations to chat rooms from users, invite users to chat rooms on those networks, and create your own chat rooms if they do not already exist. This is something proteus does not do, and fire does for just AIM.
Adium also says (on their homepage) that they will soon be releasing new versions twice a week. Something no other messenger can even think of offering due to their lack of direction.
So i’m chomping at the bit for Adium .64.
I seemed to miss this during the past week or so.
gentoo for OS X.
I learned about iTerm from some comments on photomatt’s weblog. I looked at this application about a year ago and didn’t see any reason to use it over terminal.app (besides tabbed terminals).
But it’s better now. I recently took a contract job that required setting up 8 servers (FreeBSD). This is something that would take me a few hours normally. With iTerm’s option of “Send input to all tab’s” I can now open sessions to each server and every command I type on one tab is replicated to all the other tabs. Very cool.
If they could just work out some other bugs(?), like not being able to turn off the toolbar (the option under view doesn’t work, but you can click on the oblong button upper right hand corner), and for some reason my font and color settings aren’t saved.
Overall, I think i’ll continue to use iTerm for when I need to replicate commands to many servers at once; probably won’t be replacing my every-day terminal though.
i’ve been pretty frusterated with the frequency of my browsers crashing in panther. i’ve narrowed it down to the flash plugin in the last few months, and submitted a bug to apple.
today i stumbled on the fix. if your mac is setup with UFS formatted file system (it probably is) and your disk name is “/”, you’re going to see this bug. you’re also going to have some problems with windows media player saying “the specified stream type is not recognized”.
rename your disk to something other than / and you’ll be good to go. i’ve not found an existing apple bug report for this, so you may see one shortly on their support site if they ever read my bugreport.
update: this is true on Mac OS Extended (Journaled) file systems as well.
i’ve used a number of OS X instant messaging clients, most recently fire for icq, yahoo, and msn, ichat for AIM, and nitro for my corporate messaging (jabber).
why I chose to use 3 different clients: i loved ichat’s simple interface, and nitro copied their interface really well. ichat of course does not support jabber, so nitro was used. msn, yahoo, and icq I rarely used, but i used fire when i needed them.
the good news: i use to use proteus before panther came out. after panther, and a number of changes in the msn and yahoo protocol proteus stopped working consistantly.
but proteus 4.0 is out now, i have all 5 services in one client–and life is good.