Just in time that we can pretend we meant to do it as a holiday gift, Adium 1.3.3b1 is out! The biggest improvements are from updating to libpurple 2.5.3, but there’s an assortment of other changes as well.

I’m happy to announce Adium 1.3, a major release seven months in the making. This release improves almost every aspect of Adium, ranging from performance and memory to Facebook chat support, and from user interface polish to much improved MSN support with personal messages (finally!). A brand new, gorgeous Contact Inspector 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, and intuitive live searching in the Standard Contact List makes it a snap to find your friends. Check out the full list of changes: 261 fixed tickets in all.

The Adium development community also saw some changes with this release, welcoming new contributors and developers as well as returning team members. If you’d like to get involved, check out our Contributing to Adium page or drop by our Adium IRC Chat to see how you can help out. We’re a fun community, and working on Adium is a great learning experience with many challenges for beginners and experienced developers alike.

We greatly appreciate the wide array of web services and support donated by NetworkRedux, and the servers and bandwidth provided by our download host CacheFly, which handle the inevitable Slashdot and Digg load spikes without the slightest trouble.

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! 🙂