Adium

Adium is an AIM client for Mac OS X. It is written using OS X's Cocoa API, and it is released under the open source GNU General Public License. Adium was created by a college student named Adam Iser, and the first version, 1.0, was released in September 2001.

Features in Adium

• Support for instant messaging on AIM through the TOC protocol
• Support for tabs allows conversations with multiple contacts to take place in a single window.
• Adium's user interface is extremely customizable, allowing users to control nearly every aspect of the "look and feel" of the program.

The last 1.x release of Adium was version 1.6.2c in September 2002.

Adium 2.0

More recently, Adam and some other developers have been working on a 2.0 release -- a complete rewrite of the Adium code that retains all of the features of previous versions, while at the same time making the inner workings of the program much "cleaner" and easier to add on to. A beta release of Adium 2.0 is expected to be made available in July or August of 2003.

Adium 2.0 by itself will be extremely limited in functionality; this is due to the fact that most of the program's functionality will be provided by plugins, which can modify virtually any aspect of Adium. Using plugins will allow Adium to provide access to other instant messaging protocols, such as MSN Messenger, ICQ, and Jabber. Plugins will also provide specialized functions that will only be needed by a small percentage of users; for example, a plugin that parses and renders any LaTeX-formatted outgoing text.

External Links

• Adium (official website) (http://www.adiumx.com)
• Official Adium Forums (http://www.funmac.com/forumdisplay.php?s=&forumid=38)