Digsby

If you are reading this, you agree to the disclaimer.

My first entry will be dedicated to a neat IM client that I recently found, called Digsby.

It's been ages since I last used an original IM client such as ICQ or MSN (except GTalk, since it's so nice and sexy and Google). My personal point of view is that original IM clients have gotten completely packed with useless shit that make them very heavy, uncomfortable to use and generally fit for people who would use Myspace or Failbook. And not only that, but there's banners, ads and popups. Notnx.
There are many alternatives to official clients, depending on the OS and liking. The most popular perhaps being Trillian. It is also probably the most "serious" project for alternative clients, offering ... basically everything. Since of lately it has been be rebuild from scratch and seems to very nice. The main problem - it has a nice free version but of course all the best stuff are left for the paid version. Anyways, this post is not about Trillian. The other quite popular client is called Pidgin (used to be known as Gaim) and was originally a Linux project that was later released for Windows as well. I was using it until I found Digsby. It's strongest points are: Lightweight, clear and simple design, plugin structure. The only "problem" is that it rests perhaps a bit too simple for today's standards.

Enter Digsby.

At first I was sceptic, since it boasted options to follow Failbook, Shitter and other such social... stuff. But I decided to give it a try since I was being bored at work. Here's what I think about it in short:

It's very pretty.
It has very cool options.
In spite of all that, it stays lightweight.
It's really free.

Now if you want to read the longer version... read on.

Beauty
Digsby comes with a few installed skins which all offer TONS of colour schemes that actually change the view a lot. And honestly, it looks awesome. Now, you will have to take my word on that or check out the screenshots on the official site, since I am too lazy to actually take screenshots and edit all the contacts names, emails and all the jazz you have to do when publishing screenshots of IM Clients. Back on topic, as I said the client is very pretty and it has something for every taste, be it light or dark. The overall design is very well done too, there are many options on the Contact List, the Message Windows all look good and tidy and you don't have trouble finding your way around. You get a nice info-window when you hover over one of your contacts.

The Options
I was surprised from all the options that this client has to offer. If we leave aside the standard multy-IM client options such as support for all the principal IM protocols such as ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, GTalk etc together with voice chat and file transfers, there are quite a few cool additions. First, as I said, you get the option to monitor your Failbook, Myspace and Twitter accounts, but there's also Linked-In which for once is a decent "social network". There's also the option to monitor multiple email accounts and show icons for each one (or not if so you desire) on your taskbar. A nice thing about it is that if you have, say, two accounts in GMail and you click one of the icons it actually opens a login link instead of just a general link to gmail leading you to the last open mailbox. that's quite nice.
The next cool option is the possibility to type in a reply directly in the little pop-up box you get when someone writes you a message. This way you don't have to open the main chat window if you are in a hurry or multi-tasking. Nifty.
Then come the contact list sorting options. You can pick two separate criteria for sorting your contacts, and also chose weather or not to group them by the first criteria. This way you can sort for example sort your contacts by protocol, then by status and have them also grouped by protocol.
There's also the ability to have the client stop all sounds and/or popups and/or everything when you running a fullscreen application. Very nifty for gaming.
Except all this, you get all the other standard options such as defining special messages and behaviour depending on your status, etc. Sound settings and all the stuff.
Finally, a good thing to know is that the application saves your settings somewhere online so if you log from another PC you don't have to spend 1 hour setting everything up all over again.

Lightweight
Not much to be said here. The application runs very smoothly, the interface never lags or anything. When I checked the memory footprint was 35mb with two chat windows open, 3 IM protocols, 2 emails and one Linked In accounts monitored. For a modern-day system this is quite reasonable.

Free
Digsby comes with a grid-computing module, similar to Seti@Home that you can enable if you want to help the developers who get paid for doing scientific calculations for some people. You don't have to though do it though, so it's up to you. Except that, there are no ads, shareware, trojans or other crap.


So that's about it, I think. You should give it a try if you have been sniffing for something new to play with. Hell, you should give it a try just because I say so...