Ben Ward

Gaim 2.0

.

Good news for people still searching for an enjoyable IM experience on Windows and seething at all the Mac users with Adium. Gaim 2.0 is in beta 1 and it’s a grand improvement over the 1.x versions.

I’ve given up with Miranda. Finally the obscuficator got the better of me. Did I say obscuficator? I mean ‘User Interface’. The plug-in based core functionality is an interesting approach, but it just makes the UI even less consistent that it is by default. I know I mock Open Source software for its poor UI rather a lot and I know I could probably do worse than to contribute a helpful email to the related developer lists on the matter. But, despite my best efforts to customise it into something I liked, Miranda was unbearable. The fact I used it for so long is somewhat puzzling, it may be due to denial as a result of spending the best part of a week just setting it up.

Gaim is more of a ‘product’, with a lot of overlap with AdiumX on the Mac. This is a good thing, and on the whole its defaut set of preferences make sense. I’d appreciate it if logging was enabled by default, and the box underneath the status selector for setting an away message is obscenely large, but once you actually figure out what it does it’s a minor quibble.

The reason for blogging this on my way to bed is because I need to put a huge warning in strong emphasis: For the love of God back up your contact lists. Do it right now. Done? No, really do it.

When you mess around with groups in Gaim, there’s an element of, how you say? Volatility. I managed to lose a handful of contacts this evening by moving contacts around groups and then deleted the groups once Gaim said they were empty. Gaim keeps everything in ‘Application Settings\.gaim’, just copy the folder elsewhere before you start messing. I was lucky and managed to recover my lost contacts from my Miranda installation, but it was a rather close call.

Comments

Previously, I hosted responses and commentary from readers directly on this site, but have decided not to any more. All previous comments and pingbacks are included here, but to post further responses, please refer me to a post on your own blog or other network. See instructions and recommendations of ways to do this.

  1. Jonty

    Thanks for the heads-up, Ben!

    I’ve used Trillian Pro on and off, but it’s relatively slow development and the ubiquitousness of MSN amongst people I know all means I’ve moved back to MSN’s standard client.

    Windows Live Messenger (Live this, Live that ;)) looks great in terms of the features on offer. Some – by their own admission – are long overdue, but it looks promising overall.

  2. Charl van Niekerk

    This is excellent news; I love Gaim. However, every time I start it up it immediately crashes. Had to uninstall and install 1.5 again. Might be my setup (I’ve got 5 accounts that need to be logged into). This also crashes 1.5 occasionally. Sorry to say, but although Gaim is very good I never found it to be one of the most stable on Windows. It seems to be substantially more stable on Linux though; maybe it’s just my imagination.

  4. IBBoard

    I’ve used Gaim for quite a while (at least from the v0.9 days), especially since I used to run solely on a Linux laptop for most of the first year. I keep checking back every so often to see what they’ve released – I did more update checks on Linux than I do under XP – but I hadn’t noticed 2.0 yet.

    As for stability, I’ve got 5 auto logins now (used to be just MSN, Y!IM, AIM and ICQ, but I’ve added one IRC now) and I’ve not had any stability issues. Sometimes it won’t connect straight off, but then sometimes Thunderbird won’t check one of my email accounts the first time I run it.

    I think I’ll have to wait for the release version, or at least an RC version, and then backup and install :)

  5. Ben

    I checked the Gaim development blog last week and they’re very enthusiastic about the feedback they’re getting. A lot of it (such as the oversized ‘Away status’ box) is already on the list to fix. It’s sounding very positive.

  6. Brett

    Got to say that Miranda I had high hopes for and used it for some time but it had so many plugins than needed constant updating nothing was getting done on the core.

    GAIM is great, just started using 2.0beta1 which has it’s share of problems, to any one out there if it’s crashing on startup try removing the jabber, smartear and state notify plugins. Hope that this will be fixed shortly.

    mind you being able to resize icons would be really nice

  7. Ben

    Well, I’m still using Gaim 2.0 on Windows. I agree that being able to make the contact icons smaller, and fit more contacts on the page, would be welcome.

    I hate having to scroll contact windows with a vengeance and at the moment, Gaim 2 is forcing that on me. Overall features and presentation seems to come out above anything else I’ve found so far. I have Skype for if/when I ever need voice comms, although I tend to prefer using that on the Mac rather than Windows. One of the two operating systems has a Bluetooth stack capable of supporting my headset mic for Skype conversations. Guess which one (it’s predictable)… Oh how I’d love an IntelPowerMac (‘Mac Pro’?)

  8. Emanuel

    I am a big Linux fan but still use Windows most of the time. The only reasons for not converting totaly to Linux is because of Yahoo messenger. I need to transfer files, share photos, do voice and webcam chats and if possible voip calls. Also Linux won’t let me see files as lists in file managers (see windows: thumbs, tiles, icons, LIST, details.) I really like the LIST feature Windows have. Why is it so hard to implement it to Linux? It saves so much work. Also the simple linux text editor has a harder way to jump to a specific line :( Make all these changes and thousands of users like me will convert to Linux for good :P

You can file issues or provide corrections: View Source on Github. Contributor credits.