June 2nd, 2007

I’ve spoken about [Adium](http://www.adiumx.com/) in the past ([1](http://www.geeklane.com/blog/2006/12/17/indispensable-mac-apps/),[2](http://www.geeklane.com/blog/2006/12/04/adium-i-want-to-like-you/)), both times I have both praised and also bagged it due to an [annoying bug](http://trac.adiumx.com/ticket/1583) involving multiple group chat conversations. Basically, If you had multiple group chat conversations going, all the text would get displayed in the first conversations window. This of course made it almost impossible to have multiple group conversations.

Thankfully, via a [comment](http://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=5776832&postID=1812221075554604629&isPopup=true) I left on the main adium blog, one of the lead developers – Evan Schoenberg took a quick look at the bug and whacked together a quick fix. Apparently it was rather basic and was caused by group conversations all using the same group chat ID and not unique ID’s. Anyway, as of Adium 1.04, the multiple group chat bug is fixed!

The seemingly simple fix actually motivated me to download the source code and take a look at it. I wouldn’t mind trying to fix some other bugs or maybe make some features better.

Evan’s quote in the comments of the bug say it all really:

>>Sigh. We really need someone interested in Adium development who actually uses MSN. This took about 30 minutes to create what I believe is a fix, and it has been a major flaw in our MSN implementation for 2 years.

The adium source code is huge, way bigger then any other source / project I’ve ever been involved in. I have a feeling it’s going to take some time to figure out how it all works.

So yeah, I now use Adium for my MSN messaging needs. It beats the pants off the clunky default MSN messenger app.