gaim and yahoo...

[Eric Eisenhart]

On Wed, Oct 16, 2002 at 09:53:09AM -0700, ME wrote:
> Some of you may have used AOL Instant Messaging, MSN Messenger, Yahoo
> Messenger, icq, irc, or other chat based systems within windows/MacOS.
> 
> If you are looking for a good prgram that can do all of these in one
> product, you may want to check out "gaim".

I have to strongly go along with this recommendation.

I've used similar programs (Fire, Proteous and Trillian) and for IM/chat,
Gaim is the best.  I used the tabbed interface so everything is in one
window and (yes, really) I have, right at this moment, 2 AIM accounts logged
in, 2 ICQ accounts, one each of Jabber, MSN and Yahoo and, of course, IRC in
3 channels.

At least one of those others has a tabbed (or similar) interface available;
none of them handle IRC nearly as well (IIRC, Fire, for example, doesn't do
private messages and all messages you send to a channel are sent as
"actions" instead of regular mesages)

I'd also tried using jabber clients a while ago; it's a nice protocol and a
good idea, but in practice finding a server that supported the protocols I
wanted and was actually up reliably was difficult, so I switched to using an
integrated client.  In theory reliability should have been *higher*, since
the task of upgrading support for individual networks when they became
incompatible is offloaded to a single place, but in practice it was lower
because I cared more if MSN or Yahoo or AIM was working that week.

One weakness of most of these integrated clients (Gaim and Gabber/Jabber
included) is that typically they're incapable of (or bad at) setting up a
new account or configuring it beyond the basic level; so you end up wanting
to install the "real" client once somewhere, create an account, configure the
details appropriately, then switch to using that account through Gaim.
-- 
Eric Eisenhart                                  eric-dot-sig at eisenhart.com
Perl, SQL, Linux and Web            ^           IRC: Freiheit at openprojects
Coder, Sysadmin and geek           /e\                AIM: falsch freiheit
http://eric.eisenhart.com/         ---                       ICQ: 48217244