Gaim 2.0 Messaging Client Hits Beta

By Nate Mook | Published December 19, 2005, 11:19 AM

AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo continue to push out new versions of their respective instant messaging clients with added features like voice and video. But the open source community has been making progress with a client of their own: Gaim. Gaim 2.0 hit beta over the weekend after 15 months of development.

Gaim 2.0 Beta 1 features a rewritten status system, smooth scrolling, support for advanced MSN Messenger features like nudges and Yahoo Doodle, improvements to file transfer under AIM and ICQ, support for Apple's Bonjour, and even voice over IP capabilities. Downloads of Gaim 2.0 are available for Windows and UNIX systems.

Comments

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Gaim, IMHO, is the best IM Client available. They just need to fix 'Send File' and 'Get File'.

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The buddy icons can be made smaller, as the main window can too. I will keep on using GAIM. At least it isn't bloated with adware, and for a beta, it works great!

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http://gaim.sourceforge....screenshots/persons.png ,,, heh, they have no concept of "userfriendly" at all. They think bigger icons are what userfriendly is or "nice", while MSN is 100 light years ahead of them. that junk still looks like an app from the early 90s. *pukes*

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Wow, that is UGLY! I've never used GAIM so I can't comment on how it works, but I like the concept.

--- You have buddies, each buddy can have accounts on separate services and you can chat with them regardless of what service they are on. ---

I'm not sure if that us useful, but it is cool. For now, I am sticking with Aim AdHack. No frills. No adware. No pop-ups. Just clean IM'ing.

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Beta is perfect. Few flaws, even fixed my MSN signing troubles.

BTW, Betanews is a bit slow... I had this for a while now :P

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trillian stable, but has none of the new features that msn/yahoo have recently upgraded too.

so Gaim better than aim?

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Didn't like the new features on the Buddy List -- couldn't turn off the large status bars with textareas below them for -- separate away messages? Very odd...

The beta looks really nice and is much more user-friendly. AIM Transfers are fixed.

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I didn't like that either. Quick fix: drag the top bar of the status area down to the very bottom. Humongous status bars gone =).

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Can't wait for the final version!

For now, I'm sticking with 1.5. This beta has a few quirks that I couldn't put up with for more than 20 seconds.

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Beta doesn't work for me. I can't initiate a conversation with anyone. Although most of the time I can talk if they send a message first. Guess I'll stick with Trillian a little while longer. Only reason I switched to Trillian in the first place was for uPNP support.

Edit:
Well tried it again several hours later, and after several reboots for driver updates, and it works like a charm.

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