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Adium

Screenshot of Adium
Developer(s)	Adium team, with Evan Schoenberg and Zachary West as Lead Developers and Eric Richie as Project Manager, created by Adam Iser
Initial release	September 2001
Stable release	1.3.8  (2009-11-04; 3 days ago) [+/−]
Preview release	1.4b15  (2009-11-06; 25 hours ago) [+/−]
Written in	Cocoa
Operating system	Mac OS X
Available in	multilingual[1]
Type	Instant messaging client
License	GNU General Public License
Website	www.adium.im

Adium is a popular free instant messaging client for Mac OS X that supports multiple IM networks, including MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, Google Talk, AIM, ICQ and XMPP. It supports many protocols through the libraries libezv (for Bonjour), MGTwitterEngine (for Twitter), and libpurple (for all other protocols). It is written using Mac OS X's Cocoa API, and it is released under the GNU General Public License, and many other licenses for components that are distributed with Adium. Beginning with the 1.4 beta release, Adium will not work in Mac OS X Tiger.^[2]

[edit] History

Adium was created by college student Adam Iser, and the first version, "Adium 1.0", was released in September 2001 and supported only AIM. The version numbers of Adium since then have followed a somewhat unusual pattern. There were several upgrades to Adium 1.0, ending with Adium 1.6.2c.^[3]

At this point, the Adium team began a complete rewrite of the Adium code expanding it into a multiprotocol messaging program. Pidgin's (formerly "Gaim") libpurple (then called "libgaim") library was implemented to add support for IM protocols other than AIM – since then, the Adium team mostly works on the GUI. The Adium team originally intended to release these changes as "Adium 2.0". However, Adium was eventually renamed to "Adium X" and released at version 0.50, being considered "halfway to a 1.0 product".^[4] Adium X 0.88 was the first version compiled as a universal binary, allowing it to run natively on Intel-based Macs.

After version Adium X 0.89.1, however, the team finally decided to change the name back to "Adium", and as such "Adium 1.0" was released on February 2, 2007.

Apple Inc. used Adium X 0.89.1's build time in Xcode 2.3 as a benchmark for comparing the performance of the Mac Pro and Power Mac G5 Quad^[5], and Adium 1.2's build time in Xcode 3.0 as a benchmark for comparing the performance of the eight-core Mac Pro and Power Mac G5 Quad.^[6]

[edit] Protocols

Adium supports encryption through Off-the-Record Messaging. The left window shows messages as received by iChat, while the decrypted conversation can be seen on the right.

Adium supports the following protocols:

• OSCAR including AIM, MobileMe (formerly known as .Mac) and ICQ services
• XMPP (formerly known as Jabber) including Google Talk and LiveJournal services
• .NET Messenger Service (also known as MSN and Windows Live)
• Yahoo! Messenger, USA & Japan
• Bonjour
• MySpaceIM
• Gadu-Gadu
• Novell GroupWise
• Lotus Sametime
• Tencent QQ
• Facebook Chat
• MeBeam with a plugin
• Tlen with a plugin
• Xfire with the XBlaze plugin
• Skype with a plugin
• IRC (beta only)
• Twitter (beta only)
• NateOn with a plugin
• StudiVZ-Plauderkasten via Nimbuzz with a plugin

[edit] Plugins and customization

Adium makes use of a plugin architecture; many of the program's essential features are actually provided by plugins bundled inside the application package. The newest version includes support for file transfer, support for the Growl notifications system, Sparkle for program updates, and support for encrypted messaging with the Off-the-Record Messaging library.

Adium is also highly customizable through the use of resources its developers call "Xtras". The program can be customized by the use of hundreds of third-party Xtras that alter the appearance of emoticons, dock icons, contact list styles, and messages styles. Adium can also be enhanced through the use of different sound sets. AppleScripts can also be utilized to automatically alter behavior in responses to certain triggers.

[edit] See also

Free software portal

• Comparison of instant messaging clients
• List of XMPP client software
• Comparison of instant messaging protocols

[edit] References

[edit] External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Adium

• Adium — official website
• Portable Adium — packaged as portable application for external drive.
• Evan Schoenberg of AdiumX, DrunkenBlog, 2004-07-15
• Interview with Chris Forsythe of Adium and Growl, OSNews, 2006-08-09
• Chris Forsythe talks up Adium, CocoaRadio, 2006-05-23