Still As Life

If you remember my blog from when I was looking for MSN for Mac, then you will recall that I mentioned Adium as a solution, however it did not have webcam support, so I kept looking for a different solution.

Adium 1.2 was released yesterday, and while it does not yet have webcam support, it sounds like it is well under way. The update has a lot of bug fixes, and adds a lot more usability to the system including adding more usability to the menu items and account management features.

There is much more than that and for full information have a look at the blog and the 1.2 release post.

It sounds like it will only be a matter of months before webcam support is available for Adium. In the meantime though, I discovered a temporary solution, if you want to use Adium. It's called MeBeam and uses Flash to integrate audio and video support. It does however do this through a web browser rather than directly through the Adium application which may not be suitable for a lot of people.

The audio and video quality is quite good, though there do seem to be a few other minor issues at this stage.

So if you like Adium, perhaps this is a solution for you. I will still be sticking with Mercury Messenger though as the webcam support is more to my preference than what MeBeam offers. Adium does sound like it will be very promising though in the near future with the release of Adium 2 which will include audio and video support.

I also came across a plugin for Adium called XBlaze that adds Xfire support to Adium, and as far as I know is the only Xfire client available on Mac. It still has a few minor bugs, but it appears to be updated relatively frequently. This is as good a reason as any for me to keep Adium on my Mac and up to date, so hopefully we'll see Adium 2 soon with full support for audio and video so I don't need another client.

Labels: software, technology