DrunkenBlog

Stalking AdiumX 0.7

The AdiumX guys have been working hard, giving me more reasons to keep pushing their product down mac-users throats wherever I can get a chance. Their efforts have been going into v0.7, which just hit beta 4 and has been a long time in coming compared to their other releases, but there's just a ton of stuff in it.

At about the second beta I started pushing a few people towards it and sending kudos, just because it's that damn good. Beta 3 was just solid as hell and found me pushing it even more people, and unfortunately a few issues have cropped up with beta 4, otherwise it'd be in everyone's hands right now.

So lets start with some of the goodness... for starters, the image to the right is what my contact list looks like now. The new 'Group Bubbles' layout for the contact list just rocks my socks. If you click here and here you can see just how customizable it is. It's just awesome, and seems to have come about primarily through some hard work of Adam Isers' in rewriting the buddy list code.

Also new are meta-contacts, which sound confusing until you have them explained (I had to check out what they were). Basically the idea is to simplify your contact list. Often times people have more than one account, sometimes more than one account per service. They may have an AIM and Yahoo account, or one account on AIM for work and one for personal... so you will be looking at your buddy list and have 5 accounts online for one person. Wasteful.

Meta-contacts basically solve that by merging them into a virtual contact in your buddy list, so instead of 5 showing up in your different groups, you just have the one, and hopefully save some scrolling. You can select them and choose which name actually shows up in the list by default; it's very easy.

Ideally, if you have the persons chat names listed in their address book card, Adium pulls them out and combines them seamlessly, however not everyone really uses the address book and in beta4 you're able to option-drag contacts onto one another to create meta-contacts. And I hate to say it, but this sort of functionality just shows how feature-poor the OSX address book is. It's a nice little feature.

They've also made a start on having file transfer notices appearing in the chat window. File transfers already have lots of problems between a few of the services as it is... they just don't take kindly to NATs and firewalls. But while they did work, they'd just throw their status into the console log, and most people have no idea how to get to the console log.

There are a bunch of other things in it, such as some welcome performance improvements. But the real performance improvements aren't really within their control at the moment; most of that will have to wait until 10.4 is released with the new Safari, which has a new webkkit that has some dramatic performance improvements. Some things, like the new Javascript engine are several orders of magnitude faster.

You can get the 0.7 beta here, although there are a few issues with it (like this one, which has bitten me) so unless you really know you're ready I might suggest you hold off. I'm 99% sure there'll be a beta5 shortly to take care of those.

I'm glad to see Adium coming along as nicely as it is, even if I wish it had more pet features. For a bunch of people doing this stuff in their spare time, they're really showing off what OSS (open source software) can accomplish and in many respects leading the way.

And apps like AdiumX and Fire are only going to become more important, especially in the short term. Beyond the convenience of a multi-protocol client, a lot of people just don't like iChat at all. This kind of surprised me, due to the types of people who were eschewing it in favor of AOL's Official AIM client, but the biggest complaints were:

• They just didn't like how iChat worked
• They found iChat to be 'feature-poor'

The features they found to be wanting always seemed to be a little different, but for whatever their reasons they're picking the AOL client over iChat, and when I've showed them Adium and Fire they've gravitated towards Adium in a big way. I swear to god the duck icon is half the battle, and tabs usually seal the deal, as does its low resource usage.

And unfortunately the official AIM client is being discontinued, and you're going to need something if iChat doesn't cut it for you, and that's a big reason why I'm so happy with the maturity some of these clients are getting to. It hasn't been officially announced that I'm aware of, but it will be officially end-of-lifed at some point in the near future. The ICQ client prolly won't be far behind, but I know for sure the AIM client is gone.

It doesn't mean AOL itself will be gone, that client will be there, and so will their larger suite... but iChat is taking over the AIM game for non-subscribers. More on that later.

 Posted by drunkenbatman
    September 27, 2004, at 06:46 PM