Adium

Adium is an instant messaging client for Mac OS X supporting multiple protocols through the libgaim library. It is written using OS X's Cocoa API, and it is released under the open source GNU General Public License. Adium was originally created by a college student named Adam Iser, and the first version, 1.0, was released in September 2001.

The next version—originally slated to be called Adium 2.0 but then renamed to Adium X—is a complete rewrite of the code of the 1.x series, and implements such features as support for more IM protocols (such as ICQ, MSN Messenger, and Jabber) using libgaim. Most of the work on libgaim itself is done by the gaim team; the Adium team mostly works on the Adium X GUI.

The latest version, 0.77, was officially released on February 18, 2005 and is a minor update. The last major update was 0.7; changes included a rewrite of the contact list code, support for grouping contacts into "meta-contacts", and better support for group chats. Many bugss were also fixed. (Notices about updates, as well as general information about the project, can be found on the project's homepage.)