Being at home for Christmas, I’m using my family’s Windows machine for my computing purposes and as such I don’t have access to my usual suite of applications. For instant messaging this is usually Kopete, which allows me to connect to a multitude of different IMP protocols (MSN and Jabber in my case) from in a single client.
On Windows I have access to the official MSN client, but this fails to meet my requirements of supporting multiple protocols. That and it looks atrocious, failing miserably to fit into the style of Windows XP (even with the tellytubby theme).
So, after some rummaging around for something else that supports the protocols I need and is free. Ideally I was also after something that could be made portable (via USB stick).
Trillian was the first port of call, having previously used it, but this was soon ruled out due to not supporting Jabber in the “Basic” version.
I then moved on to looking at portableapps.com for a USB stick friendly client. This provided me with two options; Miranda and Pidgin.
Miranda seemed to be very lightweight, especially in terms of graphics, but was immediately obtrusive with asking for details for specific accounts for protocols I’ve never used. Investigating the options menu I found a mass of options (even more than Kopete it seemed – and people often say KDE apps are overloaded in terms of options), but not one to have multiple connections to the same protocol. Investigation on this matter resulted in a suggestion to copy the plugin and do it that way; hardly ideal.
So I was left with Pidgin, which used to be called GAIM. Again I’d previously used this back when it was GAIM, so I knew what to expect. Of course GTK on Windows is hardly ideal, but it doesn’t look that bad, aside from the large font used in the contact list (or “buddy list” as Pidgin seems to want to call it). Alas this doesn’t seem to do it right either, with the groups on my contact list being arranged in a seemingly random order – with no way of changing that.
Maybe I’ve just been using Kopete for too long and have got used to it, but compared to the other applications I’ve tried over the past few days it’s got them beaten hands down.
All I can hope is that when KDE4 and Qt4 make their way into the wild, a Windows version of Kopete also follows.