[MiddleEndian]

Remember when all the major IM platforms supported xmpp and you could just use pidgin/adium/trillian/your client of choice for everything at once?

That was a fantastic time...

[JBReefer]

I remember it as a bunch of applications that supported half of the standards, were buggy, and had clunky fits-none-well UX

[anonymoushn]

My current situation where I need a bunch of different apps to IM different people is a big improvement compared to those dark times.

[lj3]

I feel that way about every windows and linux app, though. Adium on OS X was brilliantly designed. And if you didn't like the design, there were tons of skins for it.

[aaronbrethorst]

Skinning support != user experience.

That said, Adium is one of the best designed OSS apps I've used.

[dmix]

Adium OTR on the other-hand had a really bad UX. So I'm happy TextSecure/Signal figured that out.

[muddi900]

But the solution was to come up with something better, not something worse.

[Malician]

Pidgin's facebook plugin doesn't seem to parse thumbs up or images, but works well enough other than that. Google hangouts/chat plugin works well, too.