Tim wasn’t kidding — Adium for OS X (based on Gaim) is awesome. I had been using iChat on my OS X box at home until I picked up a bunch of Yahoo! Instant Messenger pals in my new job. I tried Fire for a few weeks, but it left me cold. Honestly, I never really liked iChat that much either, even after exhaustively going through its preferences and stripping it down interface-wise as much as possible (getting rid of the text bubbles, the sounds, etc.)
That being said, I hadn’t spent any time looking for alternatives, but two minutes after reading Tim’s post, I was up and running with Adium. Easy switch, and totally worth it, though I recommend disabling the sound effects immediately — I jumped out of my seat when the first IM came through with a loud “QUACK!”
iChat and Fire are both gone from my dock now.
Chad Dickerson's blog 
Hi there,
I used to read and look forward to your column in Inforworld so I have followed you along to your blog here.
I use Mac OS X on my laptop at work where I am the Techie Guy as I am called (www.osoyooscreditunion.com). My servers are also OS X Tiger servers… very nice. Low maintenance, which is important as they also force the majority of our marketing and creative writing upon me. The days go by pretty quick for me! š
But, anyhoo, I was reading this post about Adium and I wondered if you had ever used Proteus? I find it really excellent, so much so I even bought it right away. I would like a little more flexibility in customizing the look and feel but other than that it is great.
Just thought you might like to know!
Also, have you noticed that there are few chat clients for OS X that support webcams? In fact, I have only found Mercury that does, other than iChat. Do you know of any others?
If you like classic pop/rock tunes check out my Nicecast server running at http://www.goldtek.ca:8000 by punching this address into iTunes. Pretty good OS X streaming music server.
I am also just getting into having my own blog, but i can find very little good info on the os x blog server… I would love to change the themes to something a little more of my own making. Can you point me to any info along those lines?
Thanks!
Wayne
Hi Wayne,
Glad you followed me here from InfoWorld!
I hadn’t heard of Proteus, but when I did a search for it (on Yahoo of course), it looked like a lot of other people were praising it. For whatever reason, I’ve never quite taken to webcams, so I don’t know a lot about chat clients that work with webcams.
As if I could be any more unhelpful, I don’t have any experience with the OS X blog server. I did find out that it is based on blojsom and the creator’s blog is here. I bet you can find some information about templates and themes there.
Good luck!
Hmm, yes, it seems to a good addition. I don’t use chat much, but perhaps this will make it easier to manage.
I like the Growl integration, too. I’m finding more to like about Growl the more I see it. if you hate text bubbles, you might not like Growl š
I wasn’t to build AdiumX from darwinports, but for Aqua apps, perhaps that’s a better option.
Hi Chad:
Yeah, in my humble opinion, AdiumX is the answer, for the most part. Now if there were only a way to use AdiumX or another program to do video chatting – so far iSight+iChat is second to none for audio/video communications, but I hate the limitation of protocols (does not support Yahoo).