Adium vs Bitlbee Ben Kero 20080225 Adium is an instant messaging client for OS X that supports multiple protocols. It’s main web site for downloading and finding plugins and exten- sions is http://www.adiumx.com. In case you’ve never heard of Pidgin, it was what GAIM was renamed to after AOL’s lawyers came after the project threatening legal action for trademark infringement. It uses Pidgin’s infa- mous libpurple. Some of the more prominent protocols supported include: • AOL Instant Messenger • Windows Live Messenger(MSN) • Yahoo Instant Messenger • ICQ • XMPP(Jabber) • Bonjour • GTalk Adium is Mac OS X’s poster child for a successful open source project. It has a sexy cocoa interface, and has a very extensible plugin system that uses a system very much like Firefox’s XPI plugin system. That means that you’re able to add plugins from a web site without downloading it, navigating to some obscure folder, then plopping it in there and restarting. Instead, you’re able to click the file on a web site, Adium will ask if you want to install it. If you respond positively, it will download the plugin, install it, then activate it without even requiring a program restart. It also supports some advanced features such as “Off The Record” talk, which is 1 able to encypt IM conversations. It also features Growl support, a skinnable interface, interchangable emoticon sets, conversation logging, and Address Book integration. The interface is a breeze to use, accounts are easy to create, and is generally a responsive, good program. One of the problems I encountered while using Adium was the system resources that it took up. I tested the program on a 1GHz G4 and a 2.2GHz Core 2 Duo. On the G4 it consumed between 12-20% of the CPU time while on the Core 2 Duo it consumed 3-5% CPU time on 1 core. The memory usage was also high, ranging between 70 and 200 Megabytes. It is very obvious that the resources are being used well since the entire interface is very responsive, with minimal to no load times to for any part of the program. Figure 1: Default Adium interface Next up is bitlbee, which is more of an IRC→IM bridge than it is a full IM client. Bitlbee’s web site is http://www.bitlbee.org. It is released under the GPLv2 license. It too is a multi-protocol IM client, which will support anything a sane person needs(AIM, MSN Messenger, Yahoo, ICQ, and Jab- 2 ber). The program runs as a daemon in the background of a computer. The way that you connect to IM services is to connect to the daemon with your favorite IRC client. This allows several advantages that Adium can’t offer. Since there are many scriptable and configurable IRC clients you gain all of the plugins and extensions that those clients can offer. Many of the IRC clients are command-line, which also affords the ability to use GNU Screen and detach. This is one of my favorite options and allows me to to main- tain a persistent IRC connection, and integrate it with my IRC connections through irssi’s ability to connect to multiple IRC servers in a single instance. The server also allows multiple users, completely isolating them. This means that one bitlbee daemon can run on a server, and serve IM to everybody in the office/house. Once connected to the bitlbee “server”, you’re automatically joined to the &bitlbee channel with two users. You, and root. Root is your friendly bot who’s able to help you manage your accounts, list your online buddies, and inform you of status changes. For instance, for help creating accounts, simply say ’help account’ in the channel, and he will give you the main manual page for creating or editing accounts. It also holds identifies, so when you establish a new connection to the bitlbee daemon, you can authenticate and get your accounts back again. The command to add a new IM account to bitlbee is “account add protocol username password”. For instance, to add my MSN Messenger account to bitlbee, the command I would issue is “account add [email protected] *******”. If all went well, bitlbee will tell me that it successfully added the account. If I issued an “account list” command, I would see that this account I created would be labeled account 0. To bring this account line, the command to issue is “account on 0”. Root would print the connection status in the channel, and if successful, my buddies would be logging in and ”joining the channel”. The “blist” command is used to find out which friends are online, and what their current status is. To talk to them, I can either use IRC style directed chat, such as “zarathustra84: Good morning” or use IRC style queries such as “/msg zarathustra84 Good morning”. All further chat will happen in the created query window. To take an account offline, it’s as simple as “account off 0”. Although this program takes a bit of reading the documentation, and has a fairly difficult learning curve if one isn’t used to IRC, the ability to maintain a persistent connection, combined with the extraordinarily low system resources make it my personal favorite. The development community is small, but since the program has a formidable 3 learning curve, most of the people who actually use it are competent enough to develop for it. This is an advantage of something with a lightly higher learning curve and barrier to entry. Figure 2: Default Bitlbee interface(in irssi) 4.