Still As Life

Today I discovered, that MSN for Mac does not have webcam support. At all. Surely Microsoft have to realise that despite the fact that OS X is a competitor, not writing a compatible version for Mac that works completely is a very big downer for their reputation that already struggles anyway.

I did some searching though and came across a little program called Mercury. It has a few glitches every now and again, but I think they may in part have been due to the battery running low

I also uncovered aMSN, or Alvaro's MSN, which is virtually a clone of the Windows version of MSN and seems to have all of the features as well. Like Mercury, it has a few minor glitches now and then, but it mostly seems to be fine. It has its own set of emoticons which are slightly different to the original (Mercury uses the original MSN emoticons), but I don't think this is much of an issue. Just don't try and change the font colour, it crashes every time I try.

There are other options available that I found, such as Fire, which is now Adium I believe, though Fire is still available, neither of these two options are as fully featured as Mercury, and neither of them have webcam support that I could find.

The only other solution I located was Mac Messenger, however I didn't test this one out as the latest files are from 2005 so they will be quite out of date anyway, so whether or not they have webcam support, they will be missing some of the newer features of MSN anyway.

Aside from the webcam not being available through MSN for Mac, I hadn't realised how much more it was missing until I started using Mercury. Mercury and aMSN are much easier to use and are packed full of more features than MSN for Mac. Winks, nudges, all of the emoticons, everything is there. Mercury also supports multiple chat protocols which could be useful. So if you're like me and you can't stand Microsoft's weak attempt to make their software cross platform, I have to recommend Mercury or aMSN! They are great options.

Labels: software, technology