Leopard Coverage: Adium to Support AV Chat Soon

Posted by Marvin Sum on 10/28/07 in Featured, Fun & Unique, Home & Personal, Internet, Video, Web

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.

Adium Chat

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.

Adium AV Chat

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!

del.icio.us tag this | digg this | permalink | ping

9 Comment(s)

Legend:

Guest

Article Author

Contributor

Matt J said on

October 28th, 2007 at 10:01 am

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.

Fraser Drew said on

October 28th, 2007 at 10:07 am

@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…

(subscribed to comments) Add karma

-1

Will said on

October 28th, 2007 at 10:14 am

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.

-2

Mikkel said on

October 28th, 2007 at 11:16 am

@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…

Chris said on

October 29th, 2007 at 3:08 am

I use Aduim, simply because of the xblaze plugin. But since XFire will be resealed soon ill use that

Alex Clarke said on

October 29th, 2007 at 8:48 am

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.

jdr4Him said on

October 29th, 2007 at 3:29 pm

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.

-2

Mela said on

November 3rd, 2007 at 3:17 am

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.

Stratumseind Tijned said on

March 29th, 2008 at 7:41 pm

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…

Chrules said on

July 7th, 2008 at 11:58 am

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 !…