Instant Messaging with Adium
Wednesday, February 13th, 2008The freeware tool Adium (you see, we are all about good freeware here at the Mac Kindergarten) covers almost all your needs of an Instant Messaging (IM) software.
MSN is very popular in Europe, ICQ still hangs around, Yahoo messenger gets some love, Google talk, MySpace IM and the list goes on and on.
Good news for you! There is one solution to all these clients. No need to install 5 different programs, only because you want to keep up with your buddies.
Ladies and gentlemen, meet Adium!
Installation
You can get the nice, green duck at www.adiumx.com
As soon as you have completed the download, the disk image shows up in your Downloads Stack. Click it, if it is not automatically mounted for you. You see the following window.
To install an application, you just need to drag-and-drop it to your Applications folder. What you see in the above screen happens quite a lot of times. Inside the disk image there is a direct link to your Applications folder. So the only thing you need to do here is to drag the green duck to the Applications folder (as the 3 comic hands in the screen shot suggest).
After it’s copied, double click the Applications folder to open it. Locate Adium and double click it to open it.
Using Adium
The developers of Adium created a set of video tutorials, which cover the basics of Adium. You can watch them on their website.
One more thing
Adium unfortunately does not support Skype, so you have to use Skype separately, in case you need/want it.