Icrontic is proud to introduce our brand new “Open Source Evangelism” series. This regular feature will pit commercial applications against free and open source software (FOSS) to see which one comes out on top.
Today we will be taking a look at Pidgin, a popular Open Source alternative to commercial instant messaging clients.
There are myriad instant messaging clients and protocols available for you to use: AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, MSN Messenger, Google Talk, ICQ and IRC to name only a handful. I know, even the list looks like a jumbled mess. The conflicting features available with each service only further the confusion.
Pidgin is not a messaging service. It does not provide any specific messaging protocol. It is, in fact, only a client that communicates using existing messaging protocols with users of existing messaging services. You login with Pidgin using the accounts you have with these other services, like AOL, Yahoo! and Google.
Imagine replacing all of these competing messaging clients with a single application. Imagine that this replacement client has no advertising, no fluff and provides all the basic functionality you need to send messages, files and multimedia to all your friends and business associates. Imagine ditching five messengers for one, and imagine that this one messenger that truly Does It All® is endlessly configurable using a rich plug-in interface and is supported by a vibrant Open Source community. Lastly, imagine that this one client is regularly updated, has a history of years of development behind it, has no known run-time bugs and is released as a compiled Windows Installer.
Are you imagining all of this? Are you in your web communications happy space? Good! You’re imagining Pidgin, and the dream is a reality.
At this point in the article, I suggest you download Pidgin and install it so you can follow along as I talk about some specific features that make Pidgin great.
Corporate greed and adware
First off, Pidgin is not supported by advertising. None. It is supported by the community and for the community, just like truly Open Software should be.
Protocols
Pidgin: Manages all your accounts and then some.
As I hinted at in my introduction, Pidgin is a client application that supports multiple protocols. This makes it distinctly different from most other clients which are released by a messenging service and support only that service’s protocol, such as AOL Instant Messenger. A protocol, in its simplest definition, is just a specification for communication between a client and a server, or multiple, amodal clients.
Since you will see the term protocol come up a lot in this article, I just want to make it clear what we are talking about. AIM is a protocol and a client. Yahoo! IM is a protocol and a client. MSN is a protocol and a client. Pidgin is a client that supports all of the different protocols.
Some clients, such as Trillian, support multiple protocols but have limited features, are closed source and charge a fee to unlock Pro features. Pidgin has only one version which is free, is open source and feature-rich.
The buddy list
Minimalist View
At the heart of any messenging client is the buddy list. This is one area where Pidgin truly excels.
Some people do not want their buddy list cluttered with extraneous information such as buddy icons, status messages and the big one: advertisements. To that end, Pidgin provides an excellent minimalist Buddy List window that shows only the username and a status icon showing whether the person is available, idle, away or offline. If they are away or idle, it shows how long they have been gone. Optionally, you can show the protocol that the person is using and whether they are on a mobile device. I have those icons enabled in the screenshot to the right.
There is also an option to show extra information in a detailed view. This option is great for people who have extremely high resolution displays and can spare the screen real estate because it shows the status messages of buddies directly in the list. You can see a screenshot of this option by enlarging the Detailed View to the right.
Detailed View
The last thing to note here is the status drop down at the bottom of the buddy list. This allows you to quickly select from some preset statuses, as well as connect and disconnect from all your accounts at once by changing your status to and from Offline. Of course you can define and save your own custom status messages as well as how you will be visible to other people when you enable them.
Messaging and chatting
Pidgin provides a single window-format for all different messaging protocols, with some options being unavailable or hidden if the protocol being used does not support them.
The benefit of using a single window for everything from AIM to Google Talk to IRC is that the interface becomes instantly familiar. In addition, you can dock conversations in single windows similar to the way Firefox and Chrome provide tabbed browsing of web pages. There are no limits to the types of conversations that you can dock. They could be IRC chatrooms or AIM conversations sharing a single window in multiple tabs.
Conversations are dockable and open in new tabs by default.
As you can see, Pidgin supports both chatrooms and one-on-one conversations depending on the support provided by the protocols. By default, it is not possible to invite buddies using different protocols to a single chatroom, since Pidgin is bound by the limitations of the protocols being used. That being said, it is a simple matter to get in touch with people who are using a variety of messaging protocols and arrange to all meet in a single chatroom using a single protocol to hold a joint discussion.
Speaking of, why not connect to irc.icrontic.com and join us in #icrontic?
Internet Relay Chat at irc.icrontic.com / #icrontic
Now, Pidgin does have a few weaknesses in the communication department. For one, it does not support video conferencing or audio communication protocols like some other messengers. Really, though, that’s about all it’s missing. If those are not features that you absolutely rely on having in your messenger, then you probably will not miss any of the commercial messengers.
Besides, there are far better solutions than Yahoo! IM or MSN Messenger that are available for video conferencing and voice communication.
Plug-ins
Pidgin Plug-In: Transparency
I made mention of this in a few places throughout the article, but here I would like to take a closer look at Pidgin’s plug-in support.
One of the great virtues of Open Source software is that it is typically designed to be extensible so as to garner support from a vast number of developers and provide people with a means to contribute without having to modify the underlying source code and thus maintain a separate branch or release.
In this respect, Pidgin is no exception to the rule and its plug-in support is fantastic.
Pidgin ships with a number of plug-ins included with the basic release. These plug-ins are typically very small and focused on providing specific functionality. For example, there is a plug-in to enable window transparency and another that provides automatic text replacement. I like to use the text replacement plug-in to automate NickServ commands for IRC servers, as an example of its usefulness.
Here I have only talked about plug-ins that Pidgin supports in its official release. Of course there are a wealth of user created plug-ins available on the web. A good place to start if you are interested in exploring the great, wide world of Pidgin plug-ins is the Purple Plugin Pack available from Guifications.
That concludes our look at Pidgin. We hope that this has been informative, or that you at least enjoyed the cat pile. Please join us next time as we take a look at another Open Source software title here at Icrontic.
/me ends article.
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