Pidgin Editor's Review

Do you need a program to support multi instant messaging protocols? 'Pidgin' claims to be that kind of program.

With the help of 'Pidgin' you should be able to talk to your friends using AIM, ICQ, Jabber/XMPP, MSN Messenger, Yahoo!, Bonjour, Gadu-Gadu, IRC, Novell GroupWise Messenger, QQ, Lotus Sametime, SILC, SIMPLE, and Zephyr. After you add your you can begin adding your buddies. This is useful because if you use many instant messaging profiles you don't have to use the proprietary programs but instead use only one program for all of them. Unfortunately there are instant messaging profiles that are not supported. For example, I didn't see any support for Skype and as for 'Google Talk', even if it exists in the program, you have to manually configure it. This is really a problem because the program offers no support for situations like this.

An interesting feature is 'buddy pounce'. A 'buddy pounce' is much like a macro, or a recorded action. When you set a pounce on someone, you can choose from a number of events, such as sign in or status change, and then you choose from a number of actions. These actions include everything from playing a sound to sending a message to the person or to executing a command. This action will occur the next time pidgin detects the event, for example the next time the person in your buddy list who you have pounced signs in.

The user interface is simple and intuitive and I think anybody will learn how to use it very fast.

Pluses: It's free.

Drawbacks / flaws: No support for Skype and I wasn't able to configure a 'Google Talk' account.

In conclusion: Interesting program but being free doesn't mean that it doesn't have to work flawlessly. I look forward for the next release hopping that it will be improved.

version reviewed: 2.0.2