So, the battle continues. As of today [4/12/2001] Epicware has released Fire .25.a, the latest Cocoa Mac OS X IM client. If you don't know anything about Fire here is some breif information.
Fire is a hobby/project of a guy named Eric. He has a website, http://www.epicware.com and has several Mac OS X native offerings there. During Apple's public beta testing of Mac OS X one of his projects, Fire, got really popular, really, really, really popular. And that was great, because Fire wasn't popular because some big company endorsed it but because some guy in his basement had made something really good.
Fire allows registered users of every major IM service [AIM, ICQ, IRC, Jabber, YahooIM, MSN IM] to be logged in to all of those services, and communicate with all of their buddies from each of those services all at the same time in a simple and familiar interface [it works a lot like AIM feature and GUI wise].
Now for anyone who uses more than one of these services, loves Macintosh, grassroots software, and Mac OS X, this is one of the greatest things out there!
Best part, its free. And according to Eric it will always be free. And for all of us hardcore Mac users it will also never be available for any other platform but OS X [YAY!].
So, I digress. Regardless the week of March 24th AOL began to block the libraries that Fire uses to connect. And because of that every other day Epicware would release a new version of Fire with a new work around, for about a week. Then it got to be too much.
Today the newest version of Fire again supports AIM use.
If you have used the AOL AIM Beta for Mac OS X and haven't used Fire TRY IT, you will like it better. It is faster, has more features and options, greater stability, no advertisements, more customizable preferences, and is written in Cocoa not Carbon.
For any Mac OS X user who is wondering about the benefits of Cocoa, you can see them if you compare AIM for OS X and Fire.app, it is like night and day.
Services, multibutton mice, scroll wheels, and greater speed are all indicative of Cocoa applications and Fire is a good example.
Anyone who used Fire and is now stuck with AIM, jump for joy, at least for now it is back in action.
Fire is a hobby/project of a guy named Eric. He has a website, http://www.epicware.com and has several Mac OS X native offerings there. During Apple's public beta testing of Mac OS X one of his projects, Fire, got really popular, really, really, really popular. And that was great, because Fire wasn't popular because some big company endorsed it but because some guy in his basement had made something really good.
Fire allows registered users of every major IM service [AIM, ICQ, IRC, Jabber, YahooIM, MSN IM] to be logged in to all of those services, and communicate with all of their buddies from each of those services all at the same time in a simple and familiar interface [it works a lot like AIM feature and GUI wise].
Now for anyone who uses more than one of these services, loves Macintosh, grassroots software, and Mac OS X, this is one of the greatest things out there!
Best part, its free. And according to Eric it will always be free. And for all of us hardcore Mac users it will also never be available for any other platform but OS X [YAY!].
So, I digress. Regardless the week of March 24th AOL began to block the libraries that Fire uses to connect. And because of that every other day Epicware would release a new version of Fire with a new work around, for about a week. Then it got to be too much.
Today the newest version of Fire again supports AIM use.
If you have used the AOL AIM Beta for Mac OS X and haven't used Fire TRY IT, you will like it better. It is faster, has more features and options, greater stability, no advertisements, more customizable preferences, and is written in Cocoa not Carbon.
For any Mac OS X user who is wondering about the benefits of Cocoa, you can see them if you compare AIM for OS X and Fire.app, it is like night and day.
Services, multibutton mice, scroll wheels, and greater speed are all indicative of Cocoa applications and Fire is a good example.
Anyone who used Fire and is now stuck with AIM, jump for joy, at least for now it is back in action.