I have so many instant message accounts, says an ICQ, a Yahoo! IM, 2 MSN, a Google Talk, 2 Jabbers, and an IRC. To online on all of them, running standard IMs are not working properly. For example, MSN don’t let me online 2 accounts on my laptop at the same time without unofficial patching. So, I have to choose other IM. Running ICQ, Yahoo! IM, MSN, Google Talk, Jabber, and IRC client on my laptop is not funny thing. They might consume all my physical memory.

The first one I tried was Gaim 1.5. Note that my laptop is running WinXP. At that time, Gaim 1.5 was unstable to run on Win32 platform so I switched to Miranda. Miranda provided very beautiful user interface. Unfortunately, I could’t only 2 jabbers and a Google Talk simulteneously. Then the third candidate was Trillian. Trillian provided the most beautiful tab-style user interface. I could online all accounts simultaneously. That was the perfect condition. In fact, all IMs’ implementation in Trillian were unstable, especially on unreliable network like ADSL. As a result, I had to restart Trillian so often to make it back to run.

Yesterday, I heard about Gaim 2. Gaim has just released Gaim 2 beta 3 last week. So I should give it a try. After running for a day, Gaim 2 beta 3 on Win32 has been running very stable. I can go online all my accounts simulteneously. No connection specific problem. In addition, Gaim lets me add IRC’s rooms as a contact list. Cool! Below is the list of noticeable features at a glance.

• User interface of contact list is still very same comparing to the last major version. All user interfaces are totally relied on GTK+. Don’t expect complex or beautiful user interface.
• Sadly, I saw very small text due to incorrect font face and font size. In addition, I don’t find any preferences to adjust these settings.
• Conversation windows are packed into single window in tab fashion.
• There is no chat history logging.
• There is no system tray icon.
• There is no notification when I received new messages.

Don’t worry. All problems mentioned above could be fixed easily. Gaim is now a kind of plugin driver application. Core functionalities are just designed for driving external plugins like IM protocol, user interface, behaviors, and other platform specific functionalities. The user interface of plugins in Gaim is very similar to Firefox. To enable additional plugins, go to menu Tools > Plugins. Below are my favorite plugins and how I adjust them.

• Gaim GTK+ Theme Control - Here you can specify font face and font size for Conversation Entry and Conversation History. After changing values in this plugin, you have to write settings to gtkrc and re-read it to activate the change.
• History - You are then allowed to automatically save chat history by enabling logging for each converstation.
• Message Notification - I don’t sure what it does but I just made it notify for IM windows.
• System Tray Icon - I like this plugin the most. It also lets me see blink tray icon for unread messages.
• WinGaim Options - This is what I mentioned about platform specific plugins. I enabled Flash window when messages are received so I can notice new unread messages at a glance without sound.

That’s it! I love Gaim 2 by now. It works perfectly for me. Most of all, Gaim is an open-source project and it is absolutely free of charge.

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