A Mac MSN program that doesn't suck balls.

The Last Gent

I'm at my wits end here. I've gone through three different programs to run MSN on my Mac, and have had problems with all three. Here's the issues:

1) Adium: Sometimes I just plain won't receive people's messages that they send me, and the program won't notify me or anything, leading to confusing, awkward conversations. I've upgraded, I've downgraded, I've tooled around with it, it just plain doesn't work.

2) The official MSN for Mac: It's doing a bit of the same, combined with me sometimes appearing offline to people when I'm not.

3) aMSN: No missed messages, thank God. However, I now appear offline to my friends 100 percent of the time, despite tooling around with the options, flicking my status around, etc. etc.

So, what else is out there? Unless anyone knows how to repair any of these three programs (help stuff turned up nada), I'd gladly keep trying more programs until I hit on one that works.

Skoal Cat

http://www.pidgin.im/download/

That Dave Fella

Does the App store let you buy IM+ or Beejive?

The Last Gent

Say whatta?

bowen

Adium uses pidgin's library. Pidgin needs to be compiled from source on OSX, so, there's that. I have had the best luck with adium to be honest. There's always trillian

The Last Gent

Also, I tried downloading Pidgin, but it just gave me a folder with a bunch of programs I can't run. It mentions I need to download some kind of Installer from Fink, but I can't make heads or tails of what I need on that website.

Edit: Basically I have no idea how to "compile from source."

Also Adium was the first one to give me trouble. I'd used it for years, until one day it just stopped receiving messages from several of my friends. Like, I'd only get half of what they sent. That's where this whole "find another client" odyssey began.

The Last Gent

Sorry for the double-post, but so far Trillian doesn't have any problems. We'll see how long THAT lasts. I'd gladly give Pidgin a shot if I knew how the hell to install it, too.

bowen

Yeah pidgin needs to be compiled from source, probably not something someone wants to do... especially consider OSX is not really meant for doing that kind of stuff by design.

Trillian is pretty solid, so, good luck.

admanb

OSX is totally meant to do that by design. It's as easy as doing it on Ubuntu. The only thing it lacks is a really consistent package manager, though I've found that those fuck things up as often as they help, so I don't really miss it.

Definitely not something the average user wants to bother with, though.

bowen

Yes, practically, by design most OSes don't want users compiling their own code. Whilst this is typical in unix-like operating systems (OSX included), I wouldn't advise it.

Though does OSX, by default, include a gcc? Let alone installing the X server and GTK+ required to compile it.