You may remember this post where i mentioned that iChat is great. But, it in fact as I said, doesn’t support Yahoo! which I now really need. So I turn to Adium, but the interface just bothers me. Why? I really have no idea. But, I lived with it, and one day it refused to connect to Yahoo!. Below is a list of the only good multi-protocol IM clients for Mac.
Adium
Fire
Instandbird
Proteus
So Adium won’t connect to Yahoo!. Off the list.
Fire as discontinued development, and I don’t want an updateless application.
Instantbird is a little too purist, with contact list, chat.
Hmm Proteus? Never tried it.
Wow. It connects to everything. It looks great. It operates great. The interface is nice. And best of all, the dock icon rocks. And I think I know why I didn’t like Adium–there was always a bird watching me a flapping it’s wings when I got a new message. Luckily, with proteus when I get a new message, the dock icon just bounces.
Proteus is the one IM application for Mac that I can live with. Yes, there is Pidgin, but that requires using the fin library and X11 (which trust me, don’t even try). The interface is simple, it connects to everything, it has options.
So Proteus is changing some of their sites, so the links to get extra stuff are all broken. I’m sure that will be fixed in the future, but the interface is still amazing, simple and functional. That’s why I like this more than the others: No flapping ducks, simple and easy but customizable interface, frequent updates, and connects to everything no problem. And that’s why it’s better than Adium, Instandbird, and fire.