Adium, for those who don’t recognize the name, is an amazing OSX application that acts as a multiple IM client for MSN, Yahoo!, Gtalk, AIM, Jabber and more (Windows users, think Trillian or Gaim). It has a variety of good features, plus its best one: it’s free.
I use it almost every day on my Macbook to talk with friends and colleagues. It’s a great little app. But it has a quirk that I’ll never manage to come to good terms with.
Adium supports tabbed conversation, which is pretty convenient indeed. The problem arises when the user want to close a tab.
There is no visible icon with an X on it, even on hover tab. The possible next step is to right click and see if there is a relevant option. Alas, there’s not.
I’m not ashamed to say that I’ve been fooling around the Adium chat interface for too long till I discovered (accidentally) how to close a tab.
You have to hover the teeny tiny icon that precedes user’s name, which then gracefully becomes an X icon, which you can click to close the tab.
Excuse me, my developer friends, but this is downright ridiculous. Why am I supposed to know that? Why not add the “Close tab” option to the right click menu? Why can’t I close a tab without activating it first? (say, when you dont want the lurker that stands above your shoulder to see what you’ve been up to)
I don’t really know if this is documented (I guess it is), but frankly, I don’t care. I shouldn’t have to search though the help system to just close a conversation tab!
EDIT: link
6 comments on this post
stelabouras #1
13.Jan.07
I am VERY disappointed by Adium..Although I use it in daily basis, I haven’t seen any new version since April 2006 and *heck* it crashes. I mean it crashes a lot &@%!
On the other hand it’s a very helpful app and very useful to have all your different accounts in one universal im!
Sugar #2
13.Jan.07
Crashes? Never experienced anything like that. The most annoying thing that sometimes happens is that it freezes some account, making it unable to send/receive messages, and I must restart it.
But other than that, no serious problems. It’s a nice little app, we mustn’t forget it’s free!
cosmix #3
13.Jan.07
I never really found it a problem. However, you’ll be glad to know that 1.0? has this option on the context menu
1.0 is nearing release. There are new ?s every week (sometimes everyday!). Just get the 1.0? version if you want to see the latest-and-greatest. It’s quite stable and much better than the ‘current’ release feature-wise.
Sugar #4
13.Jan.07
Oh, thank you, Cosmix, this is great!
Well, after you discover this little bugger it’s no big deal. But I felt so stupid when I couldn’t find it for months.
stelabouras #5
13.Jan.07
I just installed the new beta and it rules! Thanks for the tip cosmix!
amber #6
13.Jan.07
Check out http://www.koolim.com.