The Wall Street Journal is running an article entitled “Making IM Services Play Well Together” that features a review of Adium and other applications that allow you to use multiple IM accounts simultaneously.

Adium, www.adiumx.com, wins points for cuteness. The downloaded program is represented by a goofy, green duck, which plops itself in the Mac operating system dock and closes its eyes when not in use. When new messages are received via Adium, this duck flaps its wings until you open the message. The Adium user interface incorporates sleek visuals, such as status windows that gracefully float above user names whenever a cursor moves over these names.

On behalf of the Adium team, I’d like to welcome Ryan Govostes, our newest developer, to the project. No longer must I sleep with the light on, shivering in terror at PPC disassembly. Ryan has been contributing to the project for several years, contributing both code and expertise, and I’m personally thrilled to have him on board.

Mazel tov, Ryan 🙂

Adium 1.2.7 is now available. It’s just like Adium 1.2.6 except without the major XMPP problem which snuck into that release.

Unfortunately, a ‘small’ mistake in Adium 1.2.6 causes major problems over XMPP. We have found and corrected the problem. Adium_1.2.7b1 is available with the fix, [24183].

Please note that this is a beta of 1.2.7. We’ll try to have a release of 1.2.7 out once we’ve verified that there are no other new problems in 1.2.6 (relative to 1.2.5) which should be addressed at the same time.

Please don’t chime in with every old problem, pet peeve, or enhancement request in the comments of this post!

Caveat emptor: As a beta version, Adium 1.2.7b1 will be very eager to update you to the latest beta, Adium 1.3b6. That’s probably not what you want if you’re sticking to Adium 1.2.x. If you install Adium 1.2.7b1, and you want to update to Adium 1.2.7 when it is released, you will need to check adiumx.com manually and update manually. Otherwise, you will continue to be notified of Adium 1.3 beta updates until Adium 1.3 is released.

Adium 1.3b6 is plagued by the same problem as Adium 1.2.6 with XMPP; this will be fixed for the Adium 1.3 beta series in Adium 1.3b7.

This just in! Adium 1.2.6 available less than 24 hours after an ICQ network upgrade rendered previous versions unable to connect. Credit goes to our good friends over at Pidgin for fixing libpurple, our mutual services library, so quickly. 🙂 Libpurple 2.4.3 also fixes several issues with the Yahoo!, Yahoo! Japan, and QQ instant messaging services.

A few other bugs are fixed in Adium 1.2.6, too. A bug which has been around since Adium 0.50 which caused “Contact Came Back” to be displayed sometimes when contacts would sign off has finally been fixed – a single ! was in the wrong place! Also, one of the most common crashes in 1.2.x has been corrected, and message windows will once again remember their position on Mac OS X 10.4. You can check out the version history for all the details.

We’re hard at work on Adium 1.3, which is going to be an awesome release. You can check out the beta or learn about contributing time, code, or money. Remember, Adium is a free, open source, volunteer effort. 🙂

Our site and code host NetworkRedux and our download host CacheFly rock.

Many of you are reporting an error message that started appearing today:

The client version you are using is too old.
Please upgrade at http://pidgin.im/

First, about that website address: Adium uses libpurple, which is the core library from Pidgin. That’s why Pidgin’s address is in the message. We need to swap out that address for Adium’s address.

As for the rest of the error: It appears that, starting today, AOL’s servers now require ICQ 6 or later. Libpurple, in every recent version of Adium, promises to behave like ICQ 5. So, now, AOL’s server responds with “ICQ 5, you say? You’re too old!” Libpurple receives this and passes it on to Adium, which displays it to you.

Once the Pidgin team (they maintain libpurple, remember) fixes this problem, we’ll bring the fix into Adium, and we’ll get it out to you in a new release as soon as we can.

Thanks for your patience.

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.

Jesper informs me of a website called This Peanut Looks Like A Duck.

This site, like so many, originates with a single post, containing a photo of a mis-shapen peanut next to a rubber ducky. The site’s creators have followed that post with a succession of photos of other objects that look like various kinds of birds—mostly peanuts, and mostly ducks.

Thanks, Jesper. And if any of you have any other duck sightings to report, feel free to contact us.

As of May 13th, 2008 AIHyperlinks, the framework responsible for Adium’s link detection, has been renamed to AutoHyperlinks and set free.

The framework has officially been relicensed under the modified BSD license, allowing Mac developers – large and small – to use our framework in their own projects, both open and closed source, for their hyperlink gathering and autolinkification needs.

So, I’d like to challenge you, Mac developers: changing all the http://’s from a string into links is the most obvious use for it, but I’m really curious what the Mac developer community at large can do with our little framework.

Interested? Read our AutoHyperlinks wiki page, grab the source, give back (if you’d like), and have at it!