Gabtastik: An OS X Facebook client
November 1, 2008 by Ross McKillop
Yeah, I’m a bit of a Facebook junkie. I think it’s a fantastic way to keep in touch with friends that live far away, or people you haven’t seen since grade school. Though I’m not a huge fan of the “chat” feature, if you are, Gabtastic is for you.
And not only does Gabtastik work for Facebook Chat, it also supports Twitter, Meebo and GTalk. From their home page:
Gabtastik is a WebKit based Site Specific Browser (SSB) for web chat services. Gabtastik lets you keep chat sessions open on your OS X desktop outside of your regular web browser, using minimal screen real estate and system memory. Gabtastik also lets you specify window display level and window opacity, and lets you toggle quickly between supported chat services.
The installation and setup is a snap. Once completed and you’re signed in, you’ll see a window similar to the one below.
The window is neatly split into sections for chatting, a listing of your online friends, and your current conversations. To switch between conversations, just select the name of the person from the Current Conversations list.
There are only a couple of preferences you can set, but they’re quite helpful. To access them, select Gabtastik from your Apple Menu bar, and then Preferences… from the drop-down list.
From here you can set the display “Level” to Overlay (on top of all windows), Floating (um seems to be the same as Overlay??), Standard (the same ‘view’ as every other Application) or Desktop (pinned to your desktop). You can also change the opacity level, and/or make the opaque value active only on window activation. The last option is to make Gabtastik visible on all Spaces (assuming you use them).
The screenshot below is Gabtastik pinned to the desktop with a 50% opacity level.
If Gabtastik isn’t in the foreground, you’ll hear a little “beep” when someone sends you a message. When set as “embedded to desktop” (and perhaps other view options) you’ll also get a Growl notification (if you have Growl installed) that someone has sent you a message.
All in all, it’s a pretty neat little app. Again, not a lot of use for me as I’m not a huge Facebook-chat fan, but certainly useful for anyone that is.
This is pretty cool, but I think using Facebook for IM is a bit too much. And would rather stick to Adium for that purpose.
Adium also supports Facebook chat
Adium is highly unstable when it comes to Facebook chat. Messages often do not appear (neither received or sent).