Adium Beta 1.2: Final Release Coming Soon

I’m a bit late with this one but I noticed the guys over at Adium released the latest beta of their popular multi-client chat software over Christmas. Since the 25th there have been a few more bug releases, and according to Evan Schoenberg a final release “…shouldn’t be too far off.” New features include: an improved group chat interface, Bonjour support, XMPP support, reworked Applescript support, and a plethora of interface enhancements and bug fixes.

This is great news for Adium users, and the new features are very welcome but a few people voiced their opinions over at TUAW about the lack of A/V chat or some recently mentioned MSN enhancements. According to Chris Forsythe the MSN enhancements will be rolled out when libpurple is updated (should be soon), but we likely will not see A/V chat bundled with Adium for some time. Having said that I agree with what Chris and others said regarding Adium vs iChat:

Regarding voice/video. Yes, we don’t have that, and we won’t for a while. However, we’re not in the same submarket as ichat, we’re solving needs that ichat just won’t/can’t. You can’t discount that over something like voice/video. There are plenty of people who don’t need this at all.

Adium 1.2 Beta can be downloaded here, or if you are new to Adium and not keen on betasoft, grab the current release of Adium 1.1.4. And remember to be sure to donate to this great group of GPL-minded coders if you expect to have any sort of enhancements, ie: A/V chat.

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