Instant Massaging

What I love about having clients is the variety–one minute I’m working with an incredible photographer, the next minute I’m helping folks who are building an amazing site for aging baby boomers. Right after that I’m talking to people who probably know more about SEO (search engine optimization) than any Webdevs I’ve ever met. And then it’s on to the guys who do cartoons for a living.

That’s the good part. The not so good part is that all these guys use a different instant messaging system, and when they all get going you can’t see the screen for all the popups. Yahoo, Jabber, Microsoft, AOL–you name it, I need to talk with them in it.

On the PC, the answer’s obvious: Install a unified IM system. I figured there must be something similar on Mac–which is where I’m doing most of my communicating these days–and I was right. The one I picked is called Adium, which says it supports 16 different IM protocols, and now that I’m getting used to it, I like it a lot.

I downloaded it and installed it on Freddie Mac a few days ago. After a smooth installation I was completely lost; Adium munges all the interfaces it supports into a common one that’s just enough like–but not exactly alike–to be dangerous. I spent a lot of time wondering where everything went.

Fortunately, Adium’s also pretty customizable so it wasn’t a problem for long. It’s also more subtle than single IM tools–instead of a caption saying your correspondent is typing a response, the small “LED” for present (green), not present (red) turns into a pencil. I prefer the text, myself.

The big deal, though, is that it seamlessly consolidates all your IM correspondents in the same place, and in fact will let you group them according to category, not according to the chat system they’re using. And Adium does have some very cool elements, such as the best chat transcripts browser I’ve seen. It also allows you to consolidate contacts with multiple IM accounts, so that whether they’re coming from AIM or YIM, they still appear the same way.

It supports Growl, an event notification system that comes with all kinds of sound plug-ins and event fine-tuning. In its default form it’s chiming or pinging about every coiuple of minutes, which is annoying. (Do I really need a chime to tell me that Frank hasn’t touched his keyboard in the last 5 minutes?)

Overall, though, this is a nice soution that’s pretty much taken care of all those IM icons in my dock. I believe I’ll keep this one….

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