Universal IM

I have a few friends or family on each of the big four IM clients; MSN, Yahoo, Google Chat, and AIM. Since these companies are, apparently, patently stupid and refuse to work together to come up with one universal IM protocol, I have been once again searching for a third-party universal chat client that I can use.

Pidgin is pretty good. It allows you to connect to all the main and a few of the smaller chat protocols pretty easily. However, some of them require a bit of effort. You don't have a lot of leeway in fonts, styles, windows, or emoticons, and the transfer files feature is a little hit or miss. However, I used the product from this group before they renamed it to Pidgin, and the Pidgin version is much better, easier, and simpler. Note that Adium is the Mac OS X client built on the same client as this app.

I like the Trillian IM client. It is fast, nice to look at, and fairly simple to set up. However, the free client doesn't allow Jabber, which is the protocol used to connect to Google Chat. That's a major disadvantage for me, and I'm not sure the $25 is worth it to gain this one client in the Pro edition. It has a variety of emoticons, allows for the system fonts to be used, and has an email checker for each of the services you sign up for.

Qnext is a Java IM client. It was quick to setup, had options to allow all the main protocols I need, and looks pretty good. However, it has the typical problems of any java app -- it displays things in windows that are too small, it makes a lot of assumptions, and the interface is not very user-friendly (when will Java programmers learn to actually listen to the client base?). In addition, I can see no way for it to check for emails on the clients I installed, there is limited to no individual sorting of the IM list (I like to put my most used IM partners at the top of the list), and font setup seems to be limited on a per-window/IM basis (and there are very, very few emoticons available). On the plus side, there is a client to allow you to access your PC from any other PC when both are running Qnext. Which I can see being an advantage.

I just installed Digsby. It has all the clients I want (and then some), has all the options I want (and then some), has all the features I want (and then some). It has a lot of customizability, allows for email and social networking clients, has a very small install, and is pleasant to use. I think we have a winner!