#Video adium software#

In my experience, sometimes I can get better call quality with iChat, and sometimes things are better in Skype. (That’s in contrast to FaceTime’s full-screen mode, which places your call on hold.) I find iChat’s video calling often works quite well. If you swipe away from the full-screen video chat to another screen on your Mac, the call continues. In Lion, iChat supports full-screen mode when you’re video chatting, which works great. Of course, iChat does pack in one massive advantage over Adium: excellent audio and video chat support. Less annoying, but still odd: When you type messages in iChat, Lion’s iOS-style autocorrection feature doesn’t seem to work. That approach simply doesn’t mesh with my approach to multitasking. iChat still relies on a mostly useless Dock icon bounce, with no other information provided about incoming messages unless you navigate back to iChat’s window. Growl integration (which can display the text of incoming messages in floating palettes atop your screen), Adium lets you know who’s saying what without interrupting your work.

Thanks to its Dock notifications (which can include the name of the person sending you IMs) and The biggest benefit Adium adds to my daily workflow is that I can keep tabs on my incoming messages without incessantly switching back to the app. There’s one other area where iChat pales in comparison to Adium. This old Macworld hint for automatically accepting incoming chat invitations. I can’t use iChat at all unless I take advantage of It’s annoying, and iChat’s employed this bizarre behavior for as long as I can remember.

I refer, of course, to the “Accept” paradigm: Whenever you receive an IM to start a conversation-that is, an IM from someone with whom you aren’t currently engaged in an active chat window-iChat pops up a new window, asking you to approve or reject the initiated conversation. Some interactions that iChat still clings to, however, are head-scratchingly odd. Type Command-F, and then start typing the name of the buddy you’re after. Do that, and you’ll lose any custom name you’ve given the contact (say, “John Smith” instead of “jsmith88”), requiring you to edit it all over again. In iChat, you must Command-click on each name, and then choose “Add to Address Book as One Card” from the contextual or Buddies menu. In Adium, you drag usernames on top of each other to merge them. (Adium can show a service icon next to each buddy’s name.) And if you have a friend with accounts on multiple services, iChat’s approach for combing your friends’ accounts into a single buddy entry on your list isn’t as intuitive as Adium’s. There’s no obvious way to distinguish which service a friend is logged into just by looking at your buddy list. iChat 6.0 combines all your friends into a single list, which is an improvement, but still falls short in comparison to Adium. Most of us don’t mentally organize our friends by which IM service they use iChat’s former reliance on separating them that way made little sense. Adium offers built-in Facebook support iChat still requires that youĮven more welcome than the addition of Yahoo support is iChat’s implementation of a unified buddy list.

#Video adium software#

The software also includes Jabber support, which means you can use iChat to connect to other IM networks-including Facebook Chat. iChat already offered out-of-the-virtual-box support for the AIM, me.com, Mac.com, and Google Talk IM networks. The integration is complete: you see your Yahoo buddies’ avatars, availability, and current chat status. For example, iChat 6.0 allows you to sign into the Yahoo instant messaging platform.