We are thrilled to announce the availability of Adium 1.3 Beta. You can download it from the beta page or enable “Update to beta versions when available” in the Adium General preferences.

New in Adium 1.3: A brand new, gorgeous Contact Inspector which brings together all a contact’s information in one place – coalescing combined contacts’ information and accessing your Apple Address Book to give you at-a-glance information; Facebook Chat; iPhone 2.0-style filtering search in the Standard Contact List; major performance improvements; and well over 150 enhancements and bug improvements from the Adium team alone, plus major updates from our friends at libpurple and Growl. See the Beta page for the full details.

Please test, enjoy, give us feedback and help further refine Adium 1.3, and get involved! 🙂

Those of you who’ve used MSN via Adium on Leopard may have observed Adium taking a very long time to connect, or not connecting at all. A lot of you sent us bug reports about this.

The problem wasn’t a bug in Adium, or even in Libpurple. In Mac OS X 10.5.0, Apple changed the way it looks up hostnames, such as the one for the MSN server. They changed it to use a “SRV” request instead of an “A” request.

Unfortunately, some ISPs’ domain-name servers only knew how to handle “A” requests, and would ignore the “SRV” requests. That’s what was causing the problem: broken domain-name servers.

In Mac OS X 10.5.3, Apple changed its lookup method back to the earlier behavior. So, for those of you who had this problem, MSN should now connect again, without workarounds such as using OpenDNS.