Everyone needs IM right? Realtime chat is a must for my standard day. Being able to talk on the phone and ask questions to office mates at the same time is indispensable. Or having a casual conversation with a friend that lives in another country. These are some of the benefits that I find I cant live without.
I started out trying to use the built in application "IChat AV" but in order to use MSN you have to setup a complicated jabber proxy. Its not to hard for a techie but the average user would have trouble doing it. Even after you get it setup the results are not the best. Peoples names in the application look like hell because of the jabber formating. For example the msn user spam@spam.com would look like spam%spam.com@msn.ijabber.com. It makes for a overly cluttered buddies list. So IChat went away pretty fast.
Next on my list was the Microsoft MSN Chat application itself. I killed it shortly after loading it. Its a FAT pig and there is no universal binary. It just required to many system resources to run for a simple IM application. I could find no support for the application or even any info about when a universal binary would be released.
FIRE! This was one of my favorites! Open source and clean. It is a great app. It supports most chat protocols and comes in a universal binary for all you intel mac users. It has a ton of features and the tabbed chat window keeps your desktop from getting IM clutter. The only reason i don't use this as my IM application is its lack of growl support for notification.
Adium is the last on my list. It is Open Source as well. This turned out to be my favorite. It supports all the major protocols and then some. It supports encryption with OTR. It has some awesome themes as well as growl support for alerts. It also has tabbed browsing with a very clean colored chat interface. The buddy list window is very customizable and can be made to almost disappear.
Executive Summary
Use Adium :-)
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