In My Experience... | Choosier geeks choose Adium. (1308)

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Choosier geeks choose Adium.
[ Posted by Dan on March 24, 2003 | 6 Comments ]

O'Reilly has a short article about the instant massaging competition between Adium and iChat, and much of it has to do with usability. The conclusion of the article is ...

Adium seems to be the power user's choice seemingly for being unobtrusive and handling many chat sessions at once. iChat integrates with other iApps and handles the wireless and power settings for which Apple's portables are known for.

In particular though, this is the most important aspect...

Its interface is clean and simple, and I find the tabbed conversations to be immensely easier to manage than separate windows.

I can't overstate the importance and utility of a clean, targeted, non-shovelware application. The mere fact that Adium makes Instant Messages less annoying is a good thing (I get MANY instant messages every day, all day, and it adds up) and this is something iChat has been unable to do. iChat just feels like it is gobbling up my transient work mindshare.

"transient work mindshare" - What I mean is, that as I work, interruptions are costly because they divert, and STOP the progress I might be making in a UI design, or a JavaScript function (or whatever). New IMs in Adium are non obtrusive (partially because I replaced the sounds with less obtrusive sounds) whereas in iChat, the scrolling, and bubbles, and the generally more kinetic interface make the interruption more powerful than what I experience with Adium.

[via macslash]

Hmm. Haven't tried adium. ichat just annoyed me. AIM works fine for me. I don't know anyone who doesn't use it primarily, so not being able to talk to yahoo or msn accounts isn't a problem. I know people that HAVE MSN/Yahoo/ICQ, but they all use AIM for day to day chat and only use the others for things like yahoo games and selling their souls to microsoft. :-)

-Posted by JC on March 25, 2003 07:53 AM

Adium is by far (imho) the cleanest app with the least amount of required maintenance. Also, there are no ads in the Adium interface, and that goes a long way towards sanity protection.

-Posted by Dan on March 25, 2003 01:41 PM

I enjoy Proteus quite a bit. How does Adium compare to it, Dan?

-Posted by Paul on March 25, 2003 01:59 PM

I hate to admit that I can't compare Proteus to Adium in any due to never having used it (wow, that was poor grammar right there).

I used to use Fire.app, and it was ok, but I never felt a need to eexplore other chat apps after I found Adium.

-Posted by Dan on March 25, 2003 02:19 PM

Now that Safari has tabs (or will have them), maybe Apple will reconsider tabs for its other iApps?

-Posted by Joshua Kaufman on March 26, 2003 09:41 AM

u suck alll u!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

-Posted by Brendon on February 5, 2004 08:24 PM

Comment posting has been turned off because I don't have enough time and will to deal with the constant comment spamming. I'm very sorry and will fix this sometime soon (soon = before 2004 ends).