Since I started at OSAF, I've been using IM and IRC a lot more. On the IM front, I'm using iChat almost exclusively. This is switch for me, because while I had a decent number of AOL IM contacts, I definitely preferred the Yahoo IM client (at least on Windows) when I was getting started with IM, and then I moved on to Trillian. There are lots of reasons to like iChat (I don't like the balloons but I can live with them): The integration with the rest of Mac OS X -- the Address Book, and Mail is really good. I'm also finding that I like having all the pictures of people. I've never been much for the buddy icons, but I am finding that pictures of people instead of the generic icons really helps alot. It's also true (for me) that real pictures are better than cartoon pictures. That makes sense when you consider iChat AV -- there's a connection between the face you want to click on and the face that's going to be in the video window.

The other reason I'm using iChat is that Fire and Proteus, the other IM clients for the Mac, just don't seem to be cutting it. Proteus works pretty well except that it keeps dropping and reconnecting, and since I'm using speech notifications, that's annoying. I'd prefer to use Fire, which is open source, but the current version kept on crashing on me. So I'm still in search of a good multisystem IM client. Maybe the rumors will turn out to be true and Apple will get Yahoo and MSN into iChat. They could do Jabber too. Apparently the original version of iChat had Jabber support. And of course if Jens worked on it, it rocks.

I'm still looking for a fully featured IRC client for the Mac. I'm using XChatAqua because it logs in a flexible manner, it has some AppleScript support, and because I hope that the Python plugin will get fixed in the next release. But the UI looks very XChat ish, and it doesn't have enough notification mechanisms (speech, sounds, dock bounces). The new version of Conversation is looking better, but I'd like to have more options for log file naming, timestamping of each send, and some kind of scripting support.