[Juser] Re: Jabber for OSX
Jochen Wolters
jochen at polytropia.com
Sat Jun 26 09:34:49 CDT 2004
James:
> which [Jabber client]'s the best for Mac users?
The authoritative list of Jabber clients can be found on the Jabber.org
website.
<http://www.jabber.org/software/clients.php>
Here's a selection of Jabber clients that are available for Mac OS X:
Adium X - <http://www.adiumx.com/>
Fire - <http://fire.sourceforge.net/>
Proteus X - <http://www.proteusx.com/>
All of these are multi-protocol clients, have nice, polished UIs, and
provide reasonably stable Jabber support. The problem with these
clients is, though, that none of them is feature-complete with regards
to Jabber. E.g., AFAICT, none of the three clients listed above
provides services browsing or registering with a Jabber gateway.
Psi - <http://psi.affinix.com/>
Psi is a pure Jabber client and has more (Jabber-related) features than
the above listed ones. Unfortunately, it is using the Trolltech QT
portable UI library, and, although it does use the Aqua look, its
look-and-feel is decidedly un-Mac-like.
There are also some Mac-only clients like JabberFoX, TVjab, Nitro,
etc., but either development on these clients has been abandoned, or
they are nowhere near feature-complete, yet. They may be worth a look,
but I'd suggest that, you're best bet for a capable Jabber client for
the Macintosh would be Psi.
I've been contributing to the client Nitro listed above, but it appears
that I am the only one left who is actively working on the code every
now and then. ;) Although the foundation of this client is pretty
solid, us (former) developers agree that a re-write would make sense,
but, unfortunately, most of these developers have moved on to other
projects.
Still, everyone I've talked to about the topic agreed that there is a
"market" for a pure-Jabber client for OS X, and I've been collecting a
lot of ideas and have also written a bit of fresh code. So, unless I
bail out of the project, too ;), there will be yet another option
available sometime in a couple of months months.
If you have any feature request, or if you would like to generally
discuss this project -- which will include a stand-alone
Objective-C/Cocoa/XMPP library, too --, feel free to email me.
GreetinX,
Jochen.
--
"Our gut-level distaste for something new is less about our reaction to
the thing in question than it is about our fears of abandoning the
familiar and comfortable." -- Andy Ihnatko
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