The available Jabber-clients for OS X are definitely not my cup of tea, more so as I need proper groupchat support (like for debianforum.de’s chat). I guess I gave most available OS X clients a shot:

• Tkabber - The reference. Functionality is unreached. When it comes to usability, well, you have to get used to it. I’m using this on GNU/Linux, but with OS X the feel is just horrible.
• JabberFox is pretty usable but I ran into problems with character encoding and wasn’t motivated to look into it further.
• Adium is a neat mulit-protocol client based on libgaim. Unfortunately, if you’re used to Gaim, Adium just lacks too many features.
• Apple’s own iChat AV also supports jabber with v3, but there’s not even nick-completion for groupchat - barely useable.
• Another mulit-protocol client available is Fire. Unfortunately the current version has issues connecting to jabber-servers on Tiger. Besides that I don’t like it’s look and feel. Fire’s icon is nice, though.
• For now I’ll stick with Psi. I used it for some time some years ago with Debian, got the current OS X version today and it works pretty well for me. TLS/SSL, groupchat support, GnuPG integration..

Somehow this happens every now and then, I don’t know what my problem with IM-clients is but I went through the same procedure more than once with GNU/Linux. For the sake of completeness: It took the KDE-fanboy in me over a year to realize that Kopete is attractive in both, optics and features (well, besides that horrible groupchat support, if any), but way to immature and unstable. Once I even tried the jabber-plugin for irssi..

This entry was posted on Monday, May 23rd, 2005 at 13:45 and is filed under Mac. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.