Hi

For the past 3 years or so I have been using a multi messenger alternative called Trillian. Recently upgraded to 3.1 basic and its pretty cool, has all the features the old 2.0 Pro version had. Old skins work so if you have the old 2.0 pro you can just upgrade.

But I am wondering, on my Mac i use AdiumX a very cute gaim version for the mac. There must be other alternatives out there, so who has any experience with the other messengers?

Gaim does what I need it to do *no complaints here*. Gaim even has a Linux RSA key encryption plugin to protect IMs!

I used to use gaim, then switched over to trillian, and now use nither of them. As far as I know... those are really the only two out there.

I see, gaim for Linux is pretty cool, the problem with the windows version is you need to install a extra set of libraries. A bit like the whole visual basics nightmare when using certain types of chat programs. I don't like to install any extra rubbish because the programmers where to lazy to make real software :P

Anyway, trillian is nice because most my old palace friends use icq and all the new people i met have msn. Funny enought there is a euro/america split, a lot of americans use AIM for some reason.

I use gaim for windows and linux.
Gaim was never suppose to have file sharing.
So that isnt a great feature.

Or.

Webcam and shit.
But if you just want the basics, Its the best, to me,
Trillian never did it for me. but thats just my opinion.

Any instant messenger that saves you memory, like that
is the best approach though. And I highly recommend it.

I did a little research...

For multiple OS platforms
Attym - http://ayttm.sourceforge.net/
Cenetericq - http://thekonst.net/centericq
Gajim - http://www.gajim.org/
SIM - http://sim-icq.sourceforge.net/
Milkbone - http://sourceforge.net/projects/milkbone/
JMSN - http://jmsn.sourceforge.net/
Naim - http://site.n.ml.org/info/naim/
Qnext - http://www.qnext.com/

For Mac OSX
Fire - http://fire.sourceforge.net/
Proteus - http://tinyurl.com/8m882
Adium X - http://www.adiumx.com/

For Linux
aMSN - http://amsn.sourceforge.net/index.php
BitlBee - http://bitlbee.org/main.php/news.html
Kopete - http://kopete.kde.org/index.php

For Windows
IM2 - http://www.im2.com/
Miranda IM - http://www.miranda-im.org/
Blowsearch Secure - http://tinyurl.com/93rmj

Then of course....
Trillian
http://www.trillian.cc/
and Gaim
http://gaim.sourceforge.net/

Quite a few of those up top are actually under GNU.

You can read about most of them on Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_instant_messengers

Kopete is a piece of shit. It lacks more features than Gaim.

I see, gaim for Linux is pretty cool, the problem with the windows version is you need to install a extra set of libraries. A bit like the whole visual basics nightmare when using certain types of chat programs. I don't like to install any extra rubbish because the programmers where to lazy to make real software :P

Using the Gnome GTK libraries is 'real' software. Infact, it probably makes it easier to access GL functions for graphical acceleration. Using GTK to make a program in Windows would ensure cross OS compatibility between Mac/Linux/Windows too. If that's not 'real', or better than Visual Basic, I don't know what is! Atleast with C/C++ you can design your own installation program that'll run without any extra libraries.

Except for the fact I was being ironic I guess thats the difference between a programmer and a user. I don't really care what the reasons are behind GTK I know XP acts funny after installing it.

The same happened on my win 2k and NT systems after I was stupid enought to install some rubbish Visual Basics Palace software. XP is the only PC OS that runs the software I need for my work, so i stick with trillian because it runs out of the box and use adiumX on my mac, cross platform problem solved :)

I've heard Gaim runs like crap in Windows. That wasn't my reason for supporting GTK. Jon and I, if we ever write our own Palace Client, will most likely use GTK.

I have used Trillian for awhile now and have been very happy with it. Including the fact that I never ever installed anything but ICQ as a messenger and it let me set up accounts with MSN, etc.

I see now that the new version has video and audio chat. Havent tried them out yet though.

I've heard Gaim runs like crap in Windows.

Actually, contrary to what you've heard, it runs quite well under Windows.

I've always found Trillian to be a complete crappy client, it always hogged resources and decreased system performance.

I've used GAIM on Windows several times however when installing the AOL AIM client wasn't an option.

For instance; I did it at school (before graduation!) because the AOL AIM client adds registry entries and the NT permissions were set so my account couldn't write to the registry.

I wanted to get on AIM; so I grabbed GAIM and installed it and it installed fine. I had to install GTK, but that could be installed to a local directory too (since r/w access can't be done to system folders) I installed it, and it ran quick and snappy; sometimes better than Linux's version. This says a whole lot since the computers at my school were crappy 1.2GHZ CELERONS that were infested with Spyware until you couldn't hardly use them.


As for my Personal review of the Linux messengers:
aMSN - http://amsn.sourceforge.net/index.php
```Last I used it (3?) years ago, it was slow and buggy. You could easily crash it just by normal use.
BitlBee - http://bitlbee.org/main.php/news.html
```Never heard of it; I'll check it out.
Kopete
```Also not on my list of recommendations. It works, and has a lot of neat features, but it's slow and it give a lot of errors. It's built on the QT development kit, so I wonder if that has to do with anything by not being done in GTK. I've noticed applications done in QT seem to be slow and crappy (a la kbear ftp? ;-) )