So many people have recommended Proteus as an alternative IM to Adium in my comments here that I thought I must be missing something special. Well as true as that may be, for now it seems it will remain that way :)
I installed it tonight and it simply doesn’t load :) I dragged it to my Applications folder and launched it. The icon appears, bounces a few times and then disappears. No Error message, no clues at all.
When I try and search on their forum for solutions, I get the message “Error: Unable to search for posts.” but from the front page I don’t see anyone else who is having this issue. It is not a universal binary, but that shouldn’t matter.
Not a great start :) Does anyone have it working successfully on a MacBook Pro?
Technorati Tags: mac, macbook pro, os x, adium, switching, proteus
My Journey to Macintosh 
Seems like this may be the issue:
http://www.defaultware.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=7764
Its not definately the same issue but it does seem like other people are having issues with it on Intel. Oh well, I still love Adium :)
I use Adium, and I have never felt the need to change, or explore new routes. I think that it was possibly the first thing that I downloaded for my ibook.
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!
My curiosity got the better of me after all the recommendations on how much better than Adium it was :)
I prefer Adium. It just works better for my needs.
I’m prolly like one of five people left that uses ichat still. Of course I have chax so I can have tabs but since I dont know anyone with yahoo or msn chat names it works fine for me and my needs.
I used to use Proteus a while back, but when I found Adium I did some comparisons and found Adium to be much better. Here’s why…
1. When you run Proteus, it uses several processes, each eating up relatively large chunks of memory to connect to several services. Overall the memory footprint was much lower in Adium. I’m not sure if this is still true, but it was so significant when I compared them that I switched immediately.
2. There’s more appearance flexibility with Adium’s contact list.
3. Adium is updated much more frequently and seems to stay on top of the latest libgaim codebase and other technologies better.
All of the other reasons are largely subjective. Either way, they’re both very good clients, so enjoy.
You might be interested in this thread from the Adium forums (“Why do people still use Proteus?”). Personally, I have seen no compelling reason to use Proteus, and I tend to pick open-source software over proprietary if all else is equal. In this case, Proteus has slightly better default settings, but less functionality, less community, and feels nigh-on-abandoned (consider this thread from the Proteus forums). Adium continues to improve, has responsive developers and an active community, and I’m okay with customizing it to get rid of the annoying default duck.
I could be wrong, but the system requirements for the latest Proteus, 4.12, says platform – PPC, meaning it won’t run on “Intel” Macs. I also read that they are promising a universal binary soon – which will run on “Intel” Macs :). Oh, and Proteus is now ‘free,’ at least for the time being.
I’m afraid not. I’m seeing the same non-start behavior on my MacBook. I imagine it has something to do with how Rosetta is handling it but I’m not seeing any error messages in my console. :(
Another vote for Adium here. The latest version, .89.1, will help reduce the astounding number of authorization requests I’ve been receiving on ICQ by disabling ICQ’s “web aware” feature.
There does seem to be a problem moving contacts between groups, though, but not always.
… i’ve worked with all IM systems possible, because i like to test… and the best thing actually is Adium (ok, i even released one theme!)… but the lack of webcam support is annoying me… so i use aMSN when someone want to show me her tits! (god if my wife knows that!)
joking… but Proteus is way too slowly developped.. the guy is alone, not asking for help, and is having this strange protocol of coding, it’s not very pleasant to read!
I had a similar problem installing a game a couple of weekends ago. I think (and this is based on only my experience and some googling around) that some installers have a glitch with permissions during certain installs.
I had to go inside the app bundle using the Terminal and look at the permissions of the assorted files. I found a JAR file that wasn’t set to executable. I chmod’d the file to 755 and everything went smoothly after that.
You might go into your Proteus bundle and look around for something that should clearly be executable, but isn’t. Hey, it can’t hurt…
Sorry, scratch that. I just downloaded and installed Proteus to see what would happen and it crashed for reasons having nothing to do with permissions.
For what it’s worth, you can run the Console applicaiton (in the Utilities folder of the Applications folder) and, when Proteus crashes, it will tell you something of what was going on. It will also point you to a “crash log” that the system writes to your hard drive. If you’re VERY technical, you might get useful information from that (about all I got was that it crashed inside of Rosetta and that it had something to do with a bad malloc).
All of this can keep you busy while you switch back to Adium, the One True IM Client (TM) ;-)
Yea, its not like I have to “make do” with Adium. It is still the best IM client I have ever used and reading through that thread and the proteus forums, I wont be trying it again.
Funny. I just made the switch from Proteus to Adium, and I definitely prefer Adium.
A great complement to Adium for IM is Gizmoproject for VoIP (which is also a jabber client, i.e. connects with GTalk). Try the Gizmo client which is pretty neat look feel functions. Then try the Gizmo plug-in for Adium (still early days and a bit shaky and limited, but good nonetheless). Great to have full phone connections integrated with IM on your desktop.
I use Adium myself, because the Microsoft official version is pants and crashes all the bloody time (who would have thought). The only other messenger I have is the aMSN project, because it has Webcam support, as soon as Adium ads webcam support, I’ll only need the one app :)