Judi Sohn

Reinventing myself one crisis at a time.

Adium: One less reason to run Parallels

I’ve been a happy Trillian user for 3 years now, with contacts on AIM, Yahoo, MSN and Google Talk. I tried Adium a few times and just couldn’t get used to it. Never could quite articulate why I didn’t like it as much as Trillian. So I did my IM’ing through Parallels.

This morning, I decided to give Adium another try, as I knew there was a major new release a couple of months ago.

Now it feels just right. Can’t quite put my finger on what I didn’t like before that’s changed now. There were a lot of changes. All I know is that I finally feel comfortable telling Trillian not to load at Windows startup.

Growl helps. Growl is a free universal notification system for Mac OS X. It’s like the little bubbles over the notification area on a Windows XP task bar, but on steroids. You can choose exactly which applications pop up notifications, in which way, what color, how long…you name it. So when an important contact tries to reach me, Growl puts a notification where I’ll see it but it won’t be offensive or in my way. It also works with Skype, Transmit, QuickSilver and other applications I already use.

I’m working to the point that I can fire up Parallels only when I need it for specific applications, and not for things that run all the time.

Here’s what I still need in order to get rid of Outlook:

  1. Airset (our family calendar) syncing with Google Calendar or Blackberry.
  2. Salesforce working with Thunderbird (my Mac OS X mail client of choice).

That’s about it. I recently managed to move my task management needs back over to UseTasks (after trying more online task management systems than I can possible count…UseTasks won because of its mobile interface) and I use Plaxo for contacts.

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Judi Sohn

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4 responses to “Adium: One less reason to run Parallels”

  1. What really bugs me about Adium is the fact that it’s not capable of managing ICQ’s visible/invisible list… in order to edit those I always have to access ICQ2Go via icq.com… but other than that Adium really *rocks* 🙂

  2. Have you tried meebo.com? it’s a web app, so there’s nothing to download and it connects you to most every network i can think of.

  3. Yes, I’ve tried Meebo. I couldn’t get used to doing my IMs in a browser window. I tried putting it in a protected tab, or a new window and either way, I kept accidentally closing it. I prefer my IM’ing to be in a separate application.