[Juser] Re: Jabber for OSX

[Jochen Wolters]

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