Great Software : Adium

From time to time, when I come across or when someone tells me about some great software, I will post about it here.

As a recent switcher, I don't have a clue about great software for the Mac, so rely on Mac blogs and the general community. I was alerted to Adium by fellow .NET developer and switcher, Nic

For those of you who don't know, Adium is a multi network instant messaging client for Mac OSX. Best of all, it is free and open source. I like iChat, but you need to do a major hack and workaround to get it to work with other accounts such as MSN and Yahoo, and most of my mates unfortunately don't have Macs, so I can't chat to them without using MSN etc.

Adium works out of the box nicely and supports all the features you would expect in an IM client, and shows all accounts in one view. More importantly it has an icon in the menu bar and hides away the main screen of the application when you aren't using, ala MSN and Yahoo etc in the Windows world. The other nice feature is that it uses Growl for notifications which pops up cool looking balloon messages, instead of bouncing the program icon.

I give Adium a full two thumbs up on the thwo thumbs up scale.