{"id":535,"date":"2006-05-04T21:48:11","date_gmt":"2006-05-04T19:48:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/frenchfragfactory.net\/ozh\/archives\/2006\/05\/04\/instant-messaging-clients-mini-review\/"},"modified":"2006-05-04T21:48:11","modified_gmt":"2006-05-04T19:48:11","slug":"instant-messaging-clients-mini-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetozh.com\/blog\/2006\/05\/instant-messaging-clients-mini-review\/","title":{"rendered":"Instant Messaging Clients : Mini Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

Eight or nine years ago, I was using a fun little proggie named ICQ. It was fun, showing me when friends were coming online and sending little messages. Quickly though, I started to pretty much hate the whole IM concept, and at the same time all the people I was doing online stuff with were part of the same community, gamers, so I moved onto IRC<\/a> as my last messaging tool. Or so I thought :)<\/p>\n

Lately, I've been in need to keep more or less in touch with two friends who happen to use IM. One is on MSN, the other is on Yahoo. I played a few minutes with Yahoo Messenger and when it became obvious that this kind of bloated over-featured software is exactly what I don't want to use, I thought : "hell, someone smart must have made something that would allow me to connect to MSN and Yahoo with the same tool". A google query later, I found about words like "gaim" or "trillian" I had heard about for years without even wondering what these would be for :)<\/p>\n

So here it is : a biased, superficial, unneeded and quick review of Gaim<\/strong>, Trillian<\/strong>, Miranda<\/strong> and Instant-T<\/strong>.
\n<\/p>\n

What I needed<\/h2>\n

I want something that allows me to write, read, send and receive messages. And that's about it. I don't need something that allows me to make up fancy avatars, change my status every time I go to the bathroom, listen to music, watch videos, do the laundry. Well ok, I wouldn't mind a plugin for the laundry.<\/p>\n

There are gazillions of multi protocol IM clients<\/a>, but it seemed to me that the most popular ones for Windows were, in no particular order : Gaim<\/a>, Miranda<\/a>, Trillian<\/a> and Instant-T<\/a>. Feel free to bitch about your favorite software I'm not mentioning here :)<\/p>\n

Download<\/h2>\n

\"IM Duh. I think I might have already found a winner. Ok, what is my spare Windows box for if it's not for useless and redundant sofware installs ?<\/p>\n

Gaim<\/h2>\n

At first glance from their web, I was not convinced : I usually not really like Windows ports of linux softwares, which always come with their special needs for some awry GTK or Cygwin library.<\/p>\n

Gaim was quick to test : it simply refused to stay in my process list for more than 2 seconds. No visible crash, no message, no alarm, just… nothing.<\/p>\n

Trillian<\/h2>\n

I think their motto must have been something like "let's make a client for 12 protocols… and build every single feature from AIM MSN and Yahoo in it !". Bloated. Yikes.<\/p>\n

Instant-T<\/h2>\n

Actually I almost liked it, but little touches like the skinned interface and the lack of options and control over it made the software last no longer than 5 minutes on my computer. Bye bye.<\/p>\n

Miranda<\/h2>\n

\"IMFrom the first click I knew I would love it. It's a plain zip, not an installer, it's lightweight, it's compact, it's tiny, it's simple. It's an IM client, nothing less, nothing more. And there are a very lot of options<\/a> to configure and control it.<\/p>\n

Even if I was using only one protocol, say Yahoo, I would recommend using Miranda instead of Y! Messenger. It's so much faster, smoother and cleaner you just can't dislike it if you don't love it.<\/p>\n

Conclusion<\/h2>\n

Miranda pwnz them all.<\/p>\n

On a side note, I think I really should try Bitlbee<\/a> someday. It's an IRC to other protocol gateway, hence allowing you to chat with buddies from IM networks within your regular IRC client. The usage looks a bit tedious to get started, but since I generally have an instance of mIRC running and I really need IM for one or two friends, it could be quite cool.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Me and the terrible world of Instant Messaging.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[14,165,166,8,167,1,63,101],"class_list":["post-535","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-articles","tag-gaim","tag-miranda","tag-mirc","tag-msn","tag-my-life","tag-review","tag-yahoo"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetozh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/535","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetozh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetozh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetozh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetozh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=535"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetozh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/535\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetozh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=535"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetozh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=535"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetozh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=535"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}