iChat has very poor AIM

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 11:12:05 +0100

Since I bought my first Mac I have switched from having multiple instant messenger accounts to just using iChat with AIM. It was a bit of a "badge of ownership" thing I guess and, what the hell, it worked really well.

Lately, however, AIM has come to mean seeing:

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

a lot. Several times per-week at least, often several times per-day.

In this case I sent two messages and got the error after sending the second. Did the first arrive? Who can tell.

Also as time has gone on iChat has not improved very much. It still works well enough for basic chatting but I don't see anything really value added over other clients I've used. iChat still feels very 2005 to me.

So I find myself thinking about dumping AIM, and possibly iChat, and moving to something else.

One simple option would be to switch to iChat+Jabber. However I have found iChat very unreliable using my GTalk account (which is, I think, Jabber). That might be a Google issue I guess. To find out I'd have to swich to some other Jabber server. I'm also unclear about how many of my useful contacts have a Jabber account.

It's all really just a pain. If AIM would be reliable then my motivation to switch would not pass the inertial threshold. Maybe there is a way to improve AIM reliability?

Curiouser and Curiouser! on AIM

iChat has very poor AIM