Those of you who don’t have a Mac and/or use Instant Messengers can safely ignore this post…

So, I personally think that the instant messengers available for OS X are superior to the ones available on Windows, and believe you me, I’ve used most of them! Let’s review:

MSN Messenger (Windows) - 0 of 10
WHAT A JOKE!

MSN Messenger (OS X) - 1 of 10
Only slightly less annoying than the Windows version.

AOL Instant Messenger (Windows) - 1 of 10
Yeah well, it MIGHT be better than MSN messenger, but I’m not sure.

AOL Instant Messenger (OS X) - negative 2 of 10
What an insanely stupid IM client!

Miranda IM (Windows) - 0 of 10

Trillian (Windows) - 4 of 10
Yeah, it actually is better than any listed so far, and I would use it if I had no other choice, but this application is way to hard to use and set up. It’s overly complicated, doesn’t look all that great. It’s slow, buggy, and the free version doesn’t work with Jabber, therefore it doesn’t work with Google talk.

Pidgin, formerly GAIM (Windows) - 6 of 10
This may be the second best IM client available for the Windows platform. But if you need audio and/or video chat, then it’s no good. But it does support multiple protocols, and it is free, and the interface isn’t half bad for a Windows program. I definitely prefer it to Trillian because it is so much easier to use.

Google Talk (Windows) - 7 of 10
Now this isn’t a bad client at all really. There are a few things I don’t particularly like, such as having to see as many contacts as can fit in the window, even if they are offline. But all in all, not bad. And really, it’s the simple interface that makes it such a nice IM client. Everything is clean and straightforward. Of course it only works with Google Talk… which is a problem if you are an AIM user too.

AdiumX (OS X) - 8 1/2 of 10
This is a pretty decent IM client, and in fact was my main IM client for several months. It can connect to every major chat medium, it uses one buddy list (man how I wish iChat did this natively) and has something called “meta contacts.” Meta contacts are really cool for those of us who use more than one chat medium (AIM, Google Talk etc). What this means is, when you specify more than one instant messenger account for a contact, it only displays one person in the buddy list. When you double click the person in the buddy list, the IM chat window has a drop down at the top to let you change which IM account you are messaging to. I can’t tell you how much I love this feature. Also tabbed chatting, which is very cool. Who wants 8 chat windows scattered all over the desktop?!? I want one window with tabs for each chat, and Adium has it.

However, Adium’s support for incoming fonts and colors is POOR POOR POOR. In fact, it rarely ever works. And it’s support for sending fonts and colors is just as poor! And none of the chat window skins available are as nice and attractive as iChat’s. There’s a couple of supposed look alikes, but they aren’t that good.

And, like it’s cousin Pidgin, Adium does not do audio or video chats.

iChat (OS X) - 9 of 10
I really like iChat… especially iChat 4 (Leopard’s iChat). iChat 4 introduced tabbed chatting finally, but they did it right. It’s very slick. Not to mention, screen sharing, and iChat theatre are great. And iChat supports audio and video chatting.

iChat is also sort of multi protocol… meaning it supports two chat mediums, AOL and Jabber (including Google Talk). Since I don’t have many friends on Yahoo or MSN that’s fine with me.

iChat also integrates well with the OS X Address Book. You can associate a contact with an Address Book entry, and then it will store the account ID of that contact in the address book as well as using the assigned nick name in the buddy list.

iChat is very simple and easy to use, straight forward, and fairly powerful.

What I don’t like about iChat: No sound sets, Adium allows you to save Sound sets, you can easily switch between entire sound schemes or silence it altogether very quickly and easily. Not so with iChat, each event can be assigned a sound, but that’s it. So every event has to be changed individually if you take a notion to change the sound set. And there is no easy way to silence iChat.

Natively iChat does not allow you to have only one buddy list for both protocols. AIM gets it’s own buddy list, and Jabber gets it’s own buddy list. This is a major annoyance! Fortunately, there is a fix for this problem now. The excellent plugin for iChat called Chax located here. Now, the current release does not have a fix for the multiple buddy lists problem, but the most recent beta does. It does not do away with the individual lists, but creates an entirely new window with all your contacts, regardless of which chat medium they belong to. Unfortunately it doesn’t yet support meta contacts like Adium and Pidgin. But since I like iChat so much, I can live with this for now, and hopefully a future release of chax will support meta contacts.

You will notice that I did not give any IM client a 10 out of 10… that’s because I’m still waiting for that client. If iChat didn’t need a plugin to get the option to have one contact list, and if it supported meta contacts, and if it supported sound sets, then it might almost get a 10 of 10 from me

Until the most recent beta of Chax came out, I was using iChat with only Google Talk (yes I hate having multiple buddy lists that much). I even told some of the folks I have on my AIM list that I was only going to be using Google Talk and they’d have to get with the program if they wanted to IM me…

There are a few contacts I have that only use AIM though… so thank you chax for combining my buddy lists.

So that’s it, that’s my geeky post that I had to get out…