Leopard Coverage: Adium to Support AV Chat Soon
Everyone’s favorite duck is receiving a Leopard upgrade. That’s right, you will soon be able to hear the Adium duck ‘quack’, with the new AV Chat feature.
Adium is a widely used instant messaging program on the Mac, but one of its weak points when compared to iChat, is the lack of video/audio chat capabilities.
Of course, it’s taken quite some time for this feature to appear. This is partly because Adium is built on the Pidgin project. The underlying functionality like connecting and working with networks like MSN Messenger and AIM depend on Libpurple, one of the libraries from Pidgin.
Before showing you some juicy screenshots of a video chat in progress, here’s a screenshot of an Adium chat window, Leopard style.
As you can see, Adium looks just like all the Leopard apps, clean and simple. Perhaps refreshing some of the icons will make it perfect, but then again, I’m very particular about most things, so it’s probably just me. Anyway, here’s the screenshot that you’re all waiting to see.
Yup, it’s a video chat; note the use of the wet floor effect. Very nice! The good news is that all their work is currently available on SVN. Unfortunately, there’s no telling when this feature will be available for us to play with. However, the team says they’re confident we’ll love it once its done. Can’t wait for it!
Do you use Adium or iChat for instant messaging? Let us know!
I use Adium. I have to because here in the UK, MSN is the dominate protocol (why can’t everyone use GTalk?). I suspect that I’ll have to wait longer for A/V support for MSN, which annoys me considering AIM users can already use iChat. There is no decent MSN A/V capable client on the Mac. Even Microsoft’s own client doesn’t support it on the Mac.
@Matt J… I’m sooo with you!! aMSN is a fairly poor attempt, however it does if you need video desperately! Hopefully Adium will see a nice implementation, in the not too distant future…
I used Adium for a while, it’s about the same as iChat for text chats, and the invisibility feature is pretty handy. Now that more people I know have Macs with iSights though, I’ve switched to iChat. I think iChat in Leopard will cement it as my app of choice.
@Matt J: Yahoo! Messenger does it too for MSN. Though you have to manually add your contacts (again), it does have video support.
Here in Denmark, Messenger is also the only thing people use…
I use Aduim, simply because of the xblaze plugin. But since XFire will be resealed soon ill use that
I use iChat with a Jabber gateway to MSN, this works for me as I use Video chat with AIM buddies but I still want to talk to MSN people.
I use Adium because I tend to chat with people on both Yahoo and AIM and I don’t like having two apps open.
I only switch to iChat when I need to do video or audio chatting. Granted Leopard might change this but I’m not sure yet.
[...] (Via MacApper) [...]
Hope this goes out the mainstream builds soon! In my journey to enlightenment I have used GAIM, Pidgin, and Adium. (And yup they are somewhat blood related)
I’m now using Adium on a PB G4, can’t wait to try AV support.
[...] The gang at Macapper have a screenshot and some commentary. [...]
[...] it’s no longer got that ‘new’ factor. So, you can now breathe some life into your video chats and mug-shots by adding [...]
Stratumseind Tijned…
Having read the full terms and conditions it has to be said that they are very clear in terms of what the software does. The first few lines of the terms and conditions also make it very clear that this is a subscription website. Will describes it as…
I would like to use iChat, but since everybody i know uses msn i have to use Adium, which is indeed a very nice app :P.. Can’t wait to they get that A/V Support !…
Having read the full terms and conditions it has to be said that they are very clear in terms of what the software does. The first few lines of the terms and conditions also make it very clear that this is a subscription website. Will describes it as…