Evaluating New IM Client: Digsby
Sep. 21st, 2009 09:38 amMany moons ago, back when only the nerdiest of us knew what a multi-IM client was, I started using Trillian for my IMs. It was barely out of beta at the time, and not exactly stable, but I rather liked it, and I tend to get pretty set in my ways with computer apps. Future versions came along, and I had an actual paid subscription for awhile. So, it's all I've ever known, and I've used it loyally since it was new.
Recently, Trillian hasn't been very kind to me. I've been using version 3.x for years now, and all my attempts to acquire Astra have left me empty-handed. Not that there are major issues with version 3, but there are a LOT of little issues. Flaky features, buggy patches, connection weirdness, and so forth have conspired to annoy me enough to seek out a replacement.
Pidgin was my first choice, since it's super-efficient yet powerful, a combination that appeals to me. However, years of using Trillian have made me near-dependant on its feature set; specifically, its contact list management tools, which are fairly advanced compared to other apps. For all Trillian's faults, it makes up for it in having one of the most intuitive and richly-featured contact lists I've ever had the pleasure of using, which made Pidgin a very stark contrast. I wonder how much of this is a UI issue vs. actual features, but I couldn't figure out how to manage merged contacts, or select which SN for a merged contact to send a message to, both of which are features I rely upon heavily. Trillian does them beautifully: mouse-over the contact to view its contents, interact with contents as if they were just a plain account. In Pidgin, I did figure out how to merge contacts, but I couldn't figure out how to edit the merged accounts afterwards without merging a new one into the pile, and as far as I can tell, there's no way to choose which screen name to send a message to. This is quite a problem when someone has, for example, a work account and a home account which may be on at the same time (an issue I've been on the receiving end of when I worked with Syme, his IM client does this and he often ended up sending messages to the wrong computer or an account I was ignoring while working).
So, after three separate but brief evaluations of Pidgin, I gave up on it for good, and sought out something else. At Tango's suggestion, I decided to give Digsby a try. I'd actually heard about it once or twice while shopping for Twitter clients, but at the time, I wasn't ready to switch IM platforms just yet. So, I opted to take a look.
As anticipated, the out-of-the-box interface and options are really not to my liking, but after spending surprisingly little time getting intimately familiar with the settings and customization options, I was able to come up with something I liked. Trillian 3 took me almost a week to tailor to my tastes, I had Digsby as close as it'll get in one evening.
When it comes to core functionality, Digsby is pretty darn good. There are some things it lacks, but there are no features I used in Trillian that are absent from Digsby. It supports all major protocols, covering the basics (AIM, ICQ, MSN, Y!) as well as the newcomers (GTalk, Myspace, Facebook), and wandering the skin directories indicates that IRC support is imminent. Additionally, it has a service to interface with Flash chat widgets on web pages, which is nothing short of The Coolest Thing Ever. No real practical purpose for it, in my case, but it's a much more useful bonus protocol than the Rendezvous thing included with Trillian.
Oh, and Digsby has far, far better font support in IM windows than Trillian. For whatever reason, Trillian only seemed to understand 4 fonts and about 10 colours for chats, which doesn't affect my outgoing text nearly as much as incoming chats. There've been numerous occasions where I've been completely unable to read someone's text because Trillian turned their font into black-on-black. Plus, the Trillian bugs related to font formatting during copy & paste (on both ends of a conversation) are not a problem with Digsby.
The buddy list management in Digsby is still a bit lacking for my tastes, but it's much more intuitive than Pidgin. Basic functionality is straightforward, and it handles merged contacts reasonably well, albeit very different from what I'm used to. Hovering over a contact produces a floating mini-window containing the user's profile, buddy icon, away/status message (if applicable), and several helpful buttons (IM, Email, SMS, Send Files). For contacts that are merged, this mini-window also displays the different SNs for that contact, which can be selected individually. And, when starting an IM, there's a handy set of selection boxes to choose which name you're sending to, and which account you're sending from, something I always desperately wanted in Trillian.
In addition to all this, it's a stable app, and relatively low resource consumption. At the moment, it's using a whopping 10mb to do nothing, half of Trillian's idle memory consumption. The most I've seen it climb to is 50mb, when I had a handful of windows open and actively chatting in addition to messing with some settings (the options window seems to consume a lot of memory for some bizarre reason.
But, the main feature that made me squee was its multi-location support. Trillian relies heavily on locally-stored data to run, which means that to use it on multiple computers, you have to move your profile directory around a lot. While I'm not sure how Pidgin handles this, I doubt it's as awesome as Digsby. Basically, Digsby works similarly to those web-based IM clients, without requiring a perpetual browser window. You create an account on their system, which is used to login to the client as if it were a screen name. After logging in, all your accounts, preferences, away messages, and other data are stored on their servers, accessible from anywhere. So, in my case, now that I have the app installed on both my laptop and my desktop, switching between them is as easy as signing on elsewhere. It's not a proxy server though, the connection to their server only functions as remote storage for data that would normally be stored on your local computer, nothing else. Once account data is retrieved, the accounts are connected directly, with no middleman. If I could find a richly-featured Outlook-esque email client that could do this, I'd be the happiest nerd girl in the world :-)
There are also some extra features in Digsby that are intriguing, like social network integration and a lightweight email client. I played with those a tad, but the email client is too thin on features for me to ever consider seriously using (I guess it's ok if you like cellphone email), and I couldn't get the Facebook app to retrieve my timeline properly. I probably could've gotten it with enough fiddling, but I really stopped caring after awhile. It's not why I got this, but if you're interested in having an IM client that also checks Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, and LinkedIn, Digsby is definitely worth a look.
No app is without faults, and Digsby has a few things that bug me, but nothing particularly big. Mainly, the fact that merged contacts are indistinguishable from regular contacts is very irritating. My contact list is a pretty even mix of merged vs. single contacts, and I really appreciated having a unique icon for them in Trillian. In Digsby, merged contacts are given the "service icon" (ie, what protocol they're using) of the default screen name for that contact, and the only way to tell the difference between the two is to mouse-over and see what pops up. I've put in a feature request to get either a unique service icon option or a hook in the skin files to give them a different font colour ot something, so we'll see.
The installer for Digsby bears mentioning too, it's laden with sponsored extras. In addition to prompting to install the Ask! toolbar during the initial steps of setup, the last screen of the process has three checkboxes for things like changing your homepage and enabling some sort of distributed computing module in the client. I've seen a lot of people complain loudly about this, but personally, I don't have a problem with this sort of thing. Software developers have to make money somehow in order to keep making things that don't suck, and as long as the sponsored extras aren't hidden, I have no qualms with the providers of free software making money off of people who are too stupid or in too much of a hurry to uncheck the blatantly obvious "Install This Toolbar Too!" checkboxes.
But, those are the only two gripes I have with this application. It does its job well, it has a few super-awesome features, and it's not loaded down with a bunch of other random crap. Overall, I definitely recommend giving this program a look; these sorts of things aren't necessarily suited for everyone, but I like Digsby better than Trillian or Pidgin, so others might too :-)
Recently, Trillian hasn't been very kind to me. I've been using version 3.x for years now, and all my attempts to acquire Astra have left me empty-handed. Not that there are major issues with version 3, but there are a LOT of little issues. Flaky features, buggy patches, connection weirdness, and so forth have conspired to annoy me enough to seek out a replacement.
Pidgin was my first choice, since it's super-efficient yet powerful, a combination that appeals to me. However, years of using Trillian have made me near-dependant on its feature set; specifically, its contact list management tools, which are fairly advanced compared to other apps. For all Trillian's faults, it makes up for it in having one of the most intuitive and richly-featured contact lists I've ever had the pleasure of using, which made Pidgin a very stark contrast. I wonder how much of this is a UI issue vs. actual features, but I couldn't figure out how to manage merged contacts, or select which SN for a merged contact to send a message to, both of which are features I rely upon heavily. Trillian does them beautifully: mouse-over the contact to view its contents, interact with contents as if they were just a plain account. In Pidgin, I did figure out how to merge contacts, but I couldn't figure out how to edit the merged accounts afterwards without merging a new one into the pile, and as far as I can tell, there's no way to choose which screen name to send a message to. This is quite a problem when someone has, for example, a work account and a home account which may be on at the same time (an issue I've been on the receiving end of when I worked with Syme, his IM client does this and he often ended up sending messages to the wrong computer or an account I was ignoring while working).
So, after three separate but brief evaluations of Pidgin, I gave up on it for good, and sought out something else. At Tango's suggestion, I decided to give Digsby a try. I'd actually heard about it once or twice while shopping for Twitter clients, but at the time, I wasn't ready to switch IM platforms just yet. So, I opted to take a look.
As anticipated, the out-of-the-box interface and options are really not to my liking, but after spending surprisingly little time getting intimately familiar with the settings and customization options, I was able to come up with something I liked. Trillian 3 took me almost a week to tailor to my tastes, I had Digsby as close as it'll get in one evening.
When it comes to core functionality, Digsby is pretty darn good. There are some things it lacks, but there are no features I used in Trillian that are absent from Digsby. It supports all major protocols, covering the basics (AIM, ICQ, MSN, Y!) as well as the newcomers (GTalk, Myspace, Facebook), and wandering the skin directories indicates that IRC support is imminent. Additionally, it has a service to interface with Flash chat widgets on web pages, which is nothing short of The Coolest Thing Ever. No real practical purpose for it, in my case, but it's a much more useful bonus protocol than the Rendezvous thing included with Trillian.
Oh, and Digsby has far, far better font support in IM windows than Trillian. For whatever reason, Trillian only seemed to understand 4 fonts and about 10 colours for chats, which doesn't affect my outgoing text nearly as much as incoming chats. There've been numerous occasions where I've been completely unable to read someone's text because Trillian turned their font into black-on-black. Plus, the Trillian bugs related to font formatting during copy & paste (on both ends of a conversation) are not a problem with Digsby.
The buddy list management in Digsby is still a bit lacking for my tastes, but it's much more intuitive than Pidgin. Basic functionality is straightforward, and it handles merged contacts reasonably well, albeit very different from what I'm used to. Hovering over a contact produces a floating mini-window containing the user's profile, buddy icon, away/status message (if applicable), and several helpful buttons (IM, Email, SMS, Send Files). For contacts that are merged, this mini-window also displays the different SNs for that contact, which can be selected individually. And, when starting an IM, there's a handy set of selection boxes to choose which name you're sending to, and which account you're sending from, something I always desperately wanted in Trillian.
In addition to all this, it's a stable app, and relatively low resource consumption. At the moment, it's using a whopping 10mb to do nothing, half of Trillian's idle memory consumption. The most I've seen it climb to is 50mb, when I had a handful of windows open and actively chatting in addition to messing with some settings (the options window seems to consume a lot of memory for some bizarre reason.
But, the main feature that made me squee was its multi-location support. Trillian relies heavily on locally-stored data to run, which means that to use it on multiple computers, you have to move your profile directory around a lot. While I'm not sure how Pidgin handles this, I doubt it's as awesome as Digsby. Basically, Digsby works similarly to those web-based IM clients, without requiring a perpetual browser window. You create an account on their system, which is used to login to the client as if it were a screen name. After logging in, all your accounts, preferences, away messages, and other data are stored on their servers, accessible from anywhere. So, in my case, now that I have the app installed on both my laptop and my desktop, switching between them is as easy as signing on elsewhere. It's not a proxy server though, the connection to their server only functions as remote storage for data that would normally be stored on your local computer, nothing else. Once account data is retrieved, the accounts are connected directly, with no middleman. If I could find a richly-featured Outlook-esque email client that could do this, I'd be the happiest nerd girl in the world :-)
There are also some extra features in Digsby that are intriguing, like social network integration and a lightweight email client. I played with those a tad, but the email client is too thin on features for me to ever consider seriously using (I guess it's ok if you like cellphone email), and I couldn't get the Facebook app to retrieve my timeline properly. I probably could've gotten it with enough fiddling, but I really stopped caring after awhile. It's not why I got this, but if you're interested in having an IM client that also checks Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, and LinkedIn, Digsby is definitely worth a look.
No app is without faults, and Digsby has a few things that bug me, but nothing particularly big. Mainly, the fact that merged contacts are indistinguishable from regular contacts is very irritating. My contact list is a pretty even mix of merged vs. single contacts, and I really appreciated having a unique icon for them in Trillian. In Digsby, merged contacts are given the "service icon" (ie, what protocol they're using) of the default screen name for that contact, and the only way to tell the difference between the two is to mouse-over and see what pops up. I've put in a feature request to get either a unique service icon option or a hook in the skin files to give them a different font colour ot something, so we'll see.
The installer for Digsby bears mentioning too, it's laden with sponsored extras. In addition to prompting to install the Ask! toolbar during the initial steps of setup, the last screen of the process has three checkboxes for things like changing your homepage and enabling some sort of distributed computing module in the client. I've seen a lot of people complain loudly about this, but personally, I don't have a problem with this sort of thing. Software developers have to make money somehow in order to keep making things that don't suck, and as long as the sponsored extras aren't hidden, I have no qualms with the providers of free software making money off of people who are too stupid or in too much of a hurry to uncheck the blatantly obvious "Install This Toolbar Too!" checkboxes.
But, those are the only two gripes I have with this application. It does its job well, it has a few super-awesome features, and it's not loaded down with a bunch of other random crap. Overall, I definitely recommend giving this program a look; these sorts of things aren't necessarily suited for everyone, but I like Digsby better than Trillian or Pidgin, so others might too :-)