Good news for people still searching for an enjoyable IM experience on Windows and seething at all the Mac users with Adium. Gaim 2.0 is in beta 1 and it’s a grand improvement over the 1.x versions.

I’ve given up with Miranda. Finally the obscuficator got the better of me. Did I say obscuficator? I mean User Interface. The plug-in based core functionality is an interesting approach, but it just makes the UI even less consistent that it is by default. I know I mock Open Source software for its poor UI rather a lot and I know I could probably do worse than to contribute a helpful email to the related developer lists on the matter. But, despite my best efforts to customise it into something I liked, Miranda was unbearable. The fact I used it for so long is somewhat puzzling, it may be due to denial as a result of spending the best part of a week just setting it up.

Gaim is more of a product, with a lot of overlap with AdiumX on the Mac. This is a good thing, and on the whole its defaut set of preferences make sense. I’d appreciate it if logging was enabled by default, and the box underneath the status selector for setting an away message is obscenely large, but once you actually figure out what it does it’s a minor quibble.

The reason for blogging this on my way to bed is because I need to put a huge warning in strong emphasis: For the love of God back up your contact lists. Do it right now. Done? No, really do it.

When you mess around with groups in Gaim, there’s an element of, how you say? Volatility. I managed to lose a handful of contacts this evening by moving contacts around groups and then deleted the groups once Gaim said they were empty. Gaim keeps everything in Application Settings.gaim, just copy the folder elsewhere before you start messing. I was lucky and managed to recover my lost contacts from my Miranda installation, but it was a rather close call.