proteus

I use Proteus as my main chat program. For a while I was using Fire again (I used to use it back when AIM and ICQ weren't out for OS X), but the latest version of Proteus has definitely got me. My only real beef with it is that, since 1.5 is a rather big update when it comes to its inner-workings, it's a little buggy and seems to have some leakage issues. The guy who makes it knows about it, so hopefully there'll be a minor update soon.
 
For ICQ it's better than Fire, because it supports the contactlist saving on the icq servers! So could used my contacts from my PC...very cool
 
While I have tried out both Fire and Proteus, and they are both excellent IM utilities for OS X that use a variety of IM services (and both are written in Cocoa!), I have to admit that I use Fire more often for two features:

• Window docking (err... that is... windows can automatically dock to the edge of the screen -- and with 0.30, it respects the Dock): I absolutely love this. When this is enabled, I know I can just flick my cursor over to the left side of my screen and it will hit the Fire window.

• IRC support: Because we have a MacOSX.com IRC server, Fire allows me to connect to it and Proteus can't. Another tally mark for Fire!

In Proteus' defense, it is cleaner and I like the interface a bit more. It also has the floater (although I would like to be able to move it around without switching to Proteus) and it also has a menu bar status thingy (which also makes me switch to Proteus when I click it, which is annoying, and it also should be a true menu extra).
 
Another cool thing about Fire is that you speak from either English, Spanish, Italian, French, or German, and that the other person speaks one of those, and if the two are different, it will translate between the two languages for me. Granted, everyone I talk to speaks English as their native language, so for me it's useless. Still, a cool feature.

The things that have me using Proteus right now are the somewhat more frequent update, cleaner GUI, and subgroups. Groups are nice, but subgroups are much better. Being able to take a guy named "Steve" who also uses ICQ, MSN, AIM, and Yahoo and put all of his contacts in a subgroup named "Steve", collapse it, and then have the status of Steve show next to the folder as if the folder were a contact is amazingly useful (I'm adding an attachment to show what I mean). It cleans up the GUI a heck of a lot. Fire doesn't have subgroups, and so it's way too cluttered for me.
 

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I like the newest version of fire a lot (0.3) If you havent ' downloaded it, you hsould. Its much nicer. Very slick.
 
Originally posted by AdmiralAK
I did not know fire did translations. Does it patch into the babelfish translation engine ?
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I have absolutely no idea. I've thought of running Sniffles to check and see, but I haven't yet. I would guess that it does, since that seems like a heck of a feature to build in otherwise. The last I checked the help, which was admittedly in v0.29b (but that had the translations too), it didn't say. It would be nice if it did, since using Babelfish would sort of make GnuPGP encryption (another nice feature of Fire that I have yet to use) kind of pointless.
 
Originally posted by unlearnthetruth
i still prefer audion for aim.....
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I take it you mean Adium, right? Adium is the BEST aim client…ever.
Audion is kick@ss MP3 player software for the Mac.
 
Originally posted by cybergoober


I take it you mean Adium, right? Adium is the BEST aim client…ever.
Audion is kick@ss MP3 player software for the Mac.
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oops..... lol..... yes did i mention i'm an idiot? I did indeed mean Adium. I've recently been mixing those two up a lot. Thanks for the correction - i didn't even notice!
 
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