“Alternative instant messaging”

Everybody knows that MSN Messenger on Mac is never as polished as it is on the PC. Still, that doesn't mean you should give up chat clients altogether, as the Mac offers excellent alternatives, like Adium X.

This messaging client is the perfect example of an excellent open source program. It's very regularly updated and has a strong and active community. Adium X works with almost all the IM services you'll find out there, including Google Talk, Yahoo! Messenger and MSN Messenger.

The interface is simple yet colorful and multiple chats can be tabbed all into one window. If you want to engage in a private conversation with another user, Adium X support Off The Record (OTR) encrypted messaging.

As I said before, Adium X has generated an active community, which generates all sorts of extras for the client like icons, sounds, plugins or applescripts.

True, file transfer is a little flaky, and Adium X still doesn't offer voice or video chat, but it's very enjoyable to use and extremely flexible.

Adium X is a free and highly customizable IM client, that allows you to connect to almost any online chat service and engage in multiple conversations simultaneously.

Languages:

English, Spanish, German, French, Catalan, Chinese Simp, Chinese Trad, Dutch, Finnish, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Portuguese, Russian

Recent changes in Adium X:

Complete redesign of the Contact Inspector (formerly the Get Info Window) (#1148)
Added Facebook Chat service to Adium (#9607)
Added a search field to the Standard Contact List window (#6444)
Switched to MSN-Pecan, a new MSN library for libpurple. Notable changes with MSN-Pecan:
Major performance improvements, most notable when signing on multiple accounts simultaneously and when chatting while other applications are making heavy use of your hard drive.
Tons of improvements and fixes, big and small - see below for all the details!