Get started with the Adium instant messaging client

December 21, 2008 by Sukrit Dhandhania

I use several IM services, gTalk, Yahoo! Messenger, MSN Messenger, and the Facebook chat. Adium is a free instant messenger application for the Mac. It supports all the above services and more. I’ll guide you through its installation as well as setting up a gTalk and a Yahoo! Messenger account. I’m assuming that you already have a Gmail and a Yahoo! username and password.

Head over to the project’s website and download the latest version of Adium. The file you will download will be in the form of a “dmg”, which is a disk image. Once downloaded it should get mounted automatically. If not, double click it to make it mount.

Now drag the Adium application from the mounted disk image into the Applications folder of your computer. You can “unmount” the disk image from “Finder” by clicking the the eject logo next to the mounted image. That’s it, Adium is now installed on your Mac.

Let’s now launch it and setup some accounts. To launch Adium look for it in the Applications directory using Finder and double click it. It should appear in the dock at the bottom of your screen and the application will also pop up. On to menu for the Adium application click on Adium, and then choose “Preferences”. This menu should pop up for you automatically the first time you launch Adium. Let’s now add a gTalk account.

Select the “Accounts” menu option. Now click the “+” sign at the bottom left of the menu and choose “Google Talk”.

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In the window that pops up after this add your gTalk username and password. Remember that you need to enter the “@gmail.com” at the end.

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Now move on to the third tab, “Options”. Here you need to make sure the following options are set. The port must be set to 5222. The “Do strict certificate checks” must be checked. That’s all.

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By default the “Connect when Adium opens” is checked. I like to leave that checked. Now click “Okay” to save the account you just set up.

Go through the similar process to add a Yahoo! Messenger account. Click on Adium -> Preferences -> Accounts. Click on the “+” sign and choose Yahoo! Messenger. In the configuration window that opens make sure that you have the following settings.

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Adding a Contact

Once you’ve got your accounts setup all your contacts should be imported automatically. To add a new contact click on the Contact menu at the top of your screen and select the “Add Contact” option. You can also use the “⌘D” keyboard shortcut to access this option. Now select the service for which you want to add the contact to.

Adium is now installed and setup on your Mac. Enjoy chatting with your friends and family.