For years i used Adium, but sometimes i miss the video and audio features iChat provides.
As i updated to Mac OS X 10.7 aka Lion i thought i should give iChat a try. Suprisingly iChat 6 has some features which come close to Adium’s user experience:
- now supports Yahoo! Messenger, even with audio and video – that’s good!
- has an open plugin interface for thirdparty protocols
- Facebook (using Jabber): works
- Jabber server from work works out of the box
- GMail / GoogleTalk works (audio / video not tested)
- AIM out of the box
- ICQ works (you have to use an AIM account and change the server to login.icq.com and disable SSL)
- Bonjour works out of the box
Protocols i used in Adium and missing in iChat out of the box:
- Twitter (workaround: twitter.im – seems to work)
- MSN (“Cocoon” plugin is in early development, but seems promising)
- IRC (iChat 6 plugin is also in early development, but promising, was able to connect to a room, but many features missing)
- Myspace (but who is still using it anyhow 😉 )
right now iChat seems to provide almost all important protocols i used to use on Adium plus the video and audio chatting.
How did you get the iChat 6 plugin to work? I got it installed but when I try to add a new account by selecting IRC from the account type, and filling in the information nothing works.
Please reply here or via email 🙂
justin@j3gaming.com
It’s quite a time that i tried that, but as i looks like it still works. So i installed the plugin and created an account in ichat by selecting the + button to add a IRC account.
i used my freeenode username and irc.freenode.net as the server and port 6667.
after connecting i get 3 messages from irc.freenode.net, freenode’s nickserv and the actual freenode server i’m connected to (abcdef.freenode.net)
nickserv tells me that my username is registered and i have to enter the password for it. now comes the tricky part:
– in the irc.freenode.net window (talking to irc.freenode.net) enter this command: /nickserv identify with your password without the <>
– in the other tab or window you get a reply from nickserv that you’re successfully identified as
so it’s important that you send IRC commands in the chat with irc.freenode.net