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Yahoo Shutting Out Third-Party IM Clients?
prostoalex writes "Following the lead of America Online's previous attempts and MSN's actions, Yahoo is planning an update that may cut out third-party providers like Trillian or Gaim. If you're a current Trillian user with a valid Yahoo ID, you probably noticed the new welcome message: 'Yahoo! is upgrading to its newest version of Yahoo! Messenger on September 24, 2003. The upgrade is part of an ongoing process to continually enhance the overall quality of the Yahoo! Messenger service for our millions of users'." Update: 09/18 01:17 GMT by S : Trillian has just released a patch that updates the IM software "...to the newest Yahoo! and MSN protocols, to remove the recent upgrade messages."
I'm just going to make a really quick gripe about the following. I have an AIM account that I actively use, and Yahoo! and ICQ accounts that I not-so actively use.
The official AIM client for OS X is trash. Pure and simple.
There are three big third-party alternatives: Fire, iChat, and Adium. Of these, two are OSS and Fire is multi-protocol. However, all are significantly lacking in their capabilities. For instance, iChat does not support sending profiles or animated buddy icons, nor does it support tabbed IM windows. Fire and Adium support this, but Adium only has alpha OSCAR support and Fire is somewhat unstable. There are clients that I'm glazing over completely, such as Proteus and probably at least one other, but suffice to say, the state of IM is pretty damn shitty.
I'm going to make a desperate plea for someone to make a native Aqua port of GAIM. GAIM is the greatest IM client ever. I've used the Windows port, and other than slow window resizing, it's great. I would do this myself, but my programming experience is very slim.
Barring an actual port, does anybody have compilation instructions for OS X so I can at least run it under X11?