Adium Messenger for Mac.

When on Windows, I use Windows live messenger to keep in contact with people as it is the best thing to use for that kind of thing, but when it comes to messengers on the Mac operating system, the choices are pretty limited.

The best messenger app on the Mac is iChat but you can’t talk to your MSN contacts on there unless you go through some long (and complicated) process. Since you can’t chat to your MSN contacts through iChat, you’ll need to use something else and as I said before, there aren’t a lot of choices but the best one out there that I’d recommend is Adium.

Adium allows you to chat to all of your contacts on a wide list of messenger services like MSN, AIM, YIM, ICQ and a lot of others. All contacts will show up in your main contacts window in groups which tell you what service they’re on and of course it shows their status like any other messenger.

The one bad thing about Adium and a lot of messenger programs on the Mac is the lack of webcam support, you cannot use the built in iSight camera on your Mac for webcam conversations so if that’s the thing you’re looking for then you won’t be wanting Adium. There are some messengers on Mac that allow webcam use but most that I have come across don’t, not even the official Microsoft messenger app for Mac has webcam support which I found very disappointing.

Although the webcam support is lacking in Adium, they very much makes up for it with the huge amount of themes and plug-ins that you can download for it. These downloads are called Adium Xtras which can be found at the Xtras website which I’ll link to at the end of the post.

If you’re looking for an example of how you can customize the look of Adium, then take a look at this screenshot I took of my desktop. Adium is on the left hand side (you’ll notice all the contacts), the reason it is quite big is because I have all my contacts showing, you can choose to hide certain contacts if you wish which you might like as you can see that my contact list expands beyond the desktop so I have to scroll down if I am looking for someone. Some people might not like that, but like I said, it can be customized in a very large way.

The themes, the plug-ins, the smiley icons, the speech bubbles and the background image in chat windows are all things you can customize and there are still more things that you can work on.

So, I highly recommend Adium messenger for Mac as it is really brilliant and with all these add-ons, I really don’t think about the webcam problem. If you want to download it then here is all the links you’ll need:

Adium Messenger – adium.im/

Adium Xtras – www.adiumxtras.com/