Pem’s Tech Blog

I use Pidgin for IM.  It centralizes your IM clients into one program, with centralized IM logs (which are an HTML format).

It has cross-platform support (Windows, UNIX/Linux).  Unfortunately it doesn’t out-of-the-box run natively on Mac OS-X.  For Mac OS-X, Pidgin suggests to: (use Adium instead) or (install Pidgin with the Fink installer) or (compile Pidgin and its dependencies yourself, since Pidgin is open source).

I am able to use Pidgin on multiple computers, with shared-and-backed-up logs-and-preferences using service like (DropBox, Live Mesh, Syncplicity).  This is easy because you just have to set the environment variable PURPLEHOME to a directory that gets sync’ed.

It use it for: AIM, Yahoo, MSN, Google Talk (XMPP).  And it allegedly supports…  MySpaceIM (no facebook yet?).  ICQ, IRC, Bonjour, Gadu-Gadu, GroupWise, QQ, SILC, SIMPLE, Sametime.

Servers for Yahoo and MSN, only lets you be signed in from one location at a time.  AIM lets you sign into one account from multiple places at once, although it does send you a nag message (Your screen name (evilpem) has signed in from another location. This screen name is currently signed in at 2 locations. To sign off the other location(s), reply to this message with the number 1. Click here for more information).  I haven’t tested this yet for Gmail; it let me sign on with two different computers but it gave me an error when I tried to send myself a message.

Pidgin lets you set custom smileys, so it is possible to use the “correct” smileys, such as the standard Yahoo IM smileys.  You have to import these as non-standard add-ons (Tools –> Preferences –> Smiley Themes).  This requires some effort and maintenance, because stuff can change with new versions of the IM host servers (Yahoo, etc).

Pidgin is an open-source project, so if you were really into it, you could compile and modify the source to do anything, or contribute to the project.  Or write a plugin, or just use a plugin someone else wrote (Tools –> Plugins).

But one of my favorite features, that I actually use, is the Buddy Pounce.  For example, I can set it to call an external script when a particular person IM’s me.  Calling an external script means it can do anything.  For example, I use it to send me an email when I get an IM from a particular person, with the most recent HTML message log attached, then I get the email on my smart phone.

There are some little things too, like you can customize it more with plugins (I haven’t used much yet), and you can have a really long list of saved status, and I can group buddies from different IM services into a single group.  Though be careful, not all of the little things are good.

This past week, Pidgin stopped working for me with Yahoo, and I didn’t know what was going on.  I was able to sign into Yahoo from standard-Yahoo-Messenger and from Meebo, but not from Pidgin.  Apparently the problem turned out to be that Yahoo Messenger had shut down its old version 6-to-7.5 IM servers.  So the fix was (accounts -> manage accounts -> Yahoo -> Pager Server, and replaced scs.msg.yahoo.com with 66.163.181.170), and it worked.  I found the fix here searching google news for “yahoo pidgin” and got a 5-hour old post here (http://stuff.techwhack.com/6804-yahoo-messenger-pidgin) which had the answer.  (Edit: 2009/06/25: new version of Pidgin (2.5.7) fixed this, after I changed it back to scs.msg.yahoo.com)

One thing I will admit is that Pidgin takes more effort than (just using the standard IM client) or (using Meebo).  However, for me, the extra power-flexibility-clean-logs-preferences is worth the effort (and sometimes loss of other features), at least thus far.

Sometimes it is behind on a feature.  Like standard Yahoo Messenger has had video and voice chat, but Pidgin is only just adding this.

Digsby also supports Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, but I don’t really use these.  And I like Pidgin, partly because of the chat logs and the buddy pounce.

A competing IM choice, is meebo.  Meebo also uses libpurple.  Meebo also centralizes your IM logs and lets you chat from one central program.  It’s even more portable and cross-platform since it runs in a web browser.  And I guess it simplifies the message logs by making them online, but why would I care since I’d rather use DropBox/etc, and so far you can’t even download the IM logs from Meebo.  So far, Meebo has an iPhone and Android app.  I am watching meebo, and I think it has potential, but I’m still using Pidgin instead of meebo.

IM clients on smart phones (mobile devices) is sort of a different topic…

Pem (Admin) :: Jun.19.2009 :: Communication :: No Comments »

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