[perardi]

Pour one out for a fondly remembered enhancement to Mac OS X.

In a somewhat similar nostalgic vein, I remember haxies…

https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/Haxie

…and as linked in the blog post, Adium.

https://adium.im

Seemingly indispensable apps/applets/desk accessories that were either made unworkable by security changes, Sherlocking, or just the changing services we use. (Just look at those Adium services, and wistfully remember when XMPP was everywhere.)

[eyelidlessness]

I sorely miss Adium. I’ve learned to accept that I just have half a dozen mostly feature compatible chat apps open to communicate with the people who use them... but Adium was a real gem. I had it configured to minimal everything and never thought about what protocol I was using. Just a consolidated list of people and a tiny window with active chats in tabs. I’ve seen several attempts at unifying the current chat landscape and they all just look like gigantic webviews of the underlying frontend. What a step back!

[hanche]

Oh wait, I’m still using Adium. I had no idea it was no more. Admittedly, we only use it at home, over bonjour. My wife and I use it to exchange interesting links and the occasional file. It shows its age, but still works (most of the time) for this purpose.

[perardi]

We were still using Adium at work until September of 2019.

Most people were on RocketChat, but we’d had a Jabber server up forever, and people were just in the habit. We finally turned it off.

Tangent, sort of: RocketChat is just awful. Push notifications fail, it’s slow, and it just really does not want to mark a message as read. But they insist on having a local on-premises server, so what are you going to do? It’s just so much worse at the basics of chatting than Adium.

[perardi]

Ah, memories!

I had some teeny, tiny contact list that took up hardly any space on screen. Something like: https://www.adiumxtras.com/index.php?a=xtras&xtra_id=1473

Compare to Facebook Messenger for Mac, which is gigantic, but doesn’t actually present more information. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/messenger/id1480068668?mt=12

[eyelidlessness]

I had one like that then kept shrinking it until it was basically a single list of names that autohid on the right side of my screen. It took a couple years to unlearn the muscle memory of flicking the mouse over there to see activity which is now a bunch of notifications and icon badges and phone buzzes.

[baryphonic]

Hear hear. Adium was almost a vision of how things could have gone. Now I have five different dedicated desktop chat apps, four of which run in Electron-based abominations (driving up CPU and GPU utilization) plus Apple Messages. It's a disgrace. The days when I could have AIM, FB messenger and GChat all side-by-side in a native app are missed.

[dimmke]

This was a total blast from the past. I had forgotten about Adium. I used Growl for years but forgot about that too.

I still use Alfred though every day. The CMD + Space for MacOS's version of it is the first thing I disable on new installs.

[aroch]

Oh Haxies, I remember writing run-time patches (aka, cracks) to bypass licensing/registration for several pieces of software. There was a common framework, whose name no eludes me, that could be almost universally patched giving access to tens (100s?) of software.

[perardi]

I can remember that too, and that will eat away at me for a bit, because that’s non-trivial to search for now.

[robterrell]

AquaticPrime perhaps?

[duskwuff]

Oh man, that thing...

    - (BOOL)verifyLicenseData:(NSData *)data
    {
        return YES;
    }

[aroch]

Ah, I think so!

[kethinov]

I would still be using Adium today if they had made it a fully featured Matrix client. I moved to Element instead, which is nice, but I always liked Adium's UX better.

Anyone know why support for Matrix was never added to Adium? I never quite understood that given its robust support for XMPP.