Adium vs MSN for Mac vs Mercury Messenger

Adium vs MSN vs Mercury Messenger

Some information about Adium, MSN for Mac and Mercury Messenger.

In modern times, Instant messenger is so much important tool for people to contact with others. Around us, we can find lots of this kind of instant messaging client for Mac OS X, like Adium, MSN for Mac and Mercury Messenger .

Here is some information about those three tools. You can have a general impression about them. So when you choose instant messenger, you can have an idea. Let's begin.

Adium for Mac - Multi-protocol instant messaging client for Mac OS X

Adium is probably the biggest multi-protocol instant messaging application that there is for Mac.

Adium supports multiple protocols through the libgaim library. It is written using OS X's Cocoa API, and it is released under the open source GNU General Public License.

• Support for multiple services

  Adium for Mac can be used to all major messageres, including MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, Google Talk, AIM, ICQ and Jabber.

• Support plugins

  Adium for Mac is capable of supporting various plugins and can use plugins to change many of the program's essential functions.

• Own customization options

  Adium for Mac allows users to use Xtras to customize almost anything within the application such as the buddylist window, chat window, sound sets, dock icon, status icons, plugins, apple scripts and so on.

• Support various languages

  Adium for Mac is available in 27 different languages, such as Catalan, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Russian, Chinese, Swedish.

The only downside to Adium is that, like MSN Messenger OS X, it doesn’t support video chats or chatting with a microphone.

Overall however Adium is probably the most stable and most customizable messaging application there is out there for MSN on Mac OS X.

Mercury Messenger - Java MSN Messenger client

Mercury Messenger or simply "MM" (formerly called dMSN) is a Windows Live Messenger network Instant Messaging client developed in Java.

Mercury Messenger supports almost all of the features in Windows Live Messenger, bringing feature parity to Mac OS X and Linux.

• Supports video chat

  Just this feature alone makes Mercury Messenger an essential application that you need on your Mac if you want to video chat to your friends and clients on MSN. You can also stream video files over your webcam stream which is a really cool feature.

• Sign in with multiple accounts

  Be online with several MSN adresses at the same time. And you can have a different MSN name in every conversation.

• Customizable setting

  Mercury Messenger is customizable but not to the extent that you can customize Adium. With Mercury Messenger you can add plugins, change the skin and add custom emoticons to friends but that’s as far as customization with Mercury Messenger goes.

• Run from USB memory stick

  A nice thing about Mercury Messenger is that it is portable and can run from a USB memory stick. So you can load up Mercury Messenger and use it from any computer with the internet access.

MSN for Mac - A dial-up client interface to Microsoft's pay-for-access online services for Mac users

MSN for Mac OS X, a dial-up client interface to Microsoft's pay-for-access online services for Mac users, was discontinued on March 2005.

The software was, in some respects, comparable to the AOL dial-up client given its channelized interface, built-in chat and instant messaging capabilities, parental controls, and ability to accommodate multiple screen names.

• Say it face-to-face with audio and video

  If your company has Office Communications Server 2007 and Messenger for Mac 7 installed within your corporate network, you can participate in face-to-face meetings with co-workers in other cities, countries, or on Windows PCs using multi-party audio and video conferencing.

• Take better advantage of your corporate network.

  For corporate users, increased support for Office Communications Server 2007 makes it easy to search a corporate address book from within Messenger and quickly find internal contacts and their presence information. With corporate users each having an account on your corporate network, communications are more protected.

• Let co-workers know you’re available to chat

  Thanks to Mac OS X Bonjour instant networking technology, people will be able to see if you’re on the local network. New “presence” enhancements in Messenger for Mac 7 include the ability to add a personal message to your contact information, so co-workers will know more about when you’re available to chat.