We have mentioned it before when we made a review of iChat in Snow Leopard and it’s worth mentioning again a couple of times. Our all time favorite duck is without any doubt Donald Duck and the question of who gets in secondly is close between Daffy Duck and the Adium icon, but besides the icon, what makes Adium so good? We decided to find out.

The ultimate instant messaging client

Adium is a free instant messaging client, built for Mac OS X. It all started with an idea from a college student called Adam Iser and this idea about an instant messaging client for Mac, which in the beginning only supported AIM, grew larger every day and today there is a team of developers, writing on Adium to improve the users’ impressions of the application.

Today Adium is maybe the most popular instant messaging client for Mac and the reason it has gotten so far is because it supports almost every protocol available including MSN, ICQ,

MobileMe, Yahoo! Messenger, Bonjour, Skype, Twitter, Facebook and of course AOL Instant Messenger.

Adium supports nearly all IM protocols

With all these protocols Adium supports, it’s close to being the ultimate instant messaging client.

Plugin is a solution

Adium isn’t the only multi-protocol supporting application available, but what makes it better than its competitors is all the options you have available. If there is something you think is missing in Adium to be better than other clients, you can in all probability find it in their plugin directory, called ‘Xtras’. In this section you can find whatever you need from animated dock icons (me myself have Pixar’s For the Birds icon) to Chuck Norris Random Fact generator. If you want, it s also possible to recreate Adium to be “The Simpsons fan’s instant messaging client” by downloading first the dock icon and afterwards The Simpsons soundset. Then a “Do’h” happens every time a friend comes online and you can have yourself a laugh about that. Plugins give you the opportunity to customize Adium to become exactly the instant messaging client you want, and you can actually install a plugin that makes it possible to use Adium as a client for Skype. Adium has a built-in plugin manager which they call ‘Xtras Manager’ and it shows you all the plugins that you have downloaded and of course you can delete them too, if you’ve downloaded something that appears to be something that you didn’t want, and there’s also a shortcut to the site where you can find additional Xtras (plugins) for your Adium.

Unfortunately Adium doesn’t have its own notification system, but it supports Growl, which you can set up and get notifications when your contacts or buddies comes online. Alternatively you can get the dock icon to jump, when certain contacts appear online.

It isn’t perfect yet

Though Adium is, according to what is mentioned earlier in this review, the ultimate instant messaging client, it still has shortcomings. Every MacBook and MacBook Pro have built-in iSight cameras and Adium hasn’t managed to utilize those yet. In other words; Adium doesn’t support video nor voice chat, and that’s probably the reason why most Messenger users prefer ‘Microsoft Messenger for Mac’ to Adium.

The total impression of Adium is still positive and we’ll gladly recommend this application to every Mac user who wants to use Messenger and don’t care if he or she can video chat or not.

4/5 STARS

Click here to download Adium