The Pidgin guys are back from their holidays I guess, this is the second release this month! Pidgin is an instant messaging program for Windows, Linux, BSD, and other Unixes. You can talk to your friends using AIM, ICQ, Jabber/XMPP, MSN Messenger, Yahoo!, Bonjour, Gadu-Gadu, IRC, Novell GroupWise Messenger, QQ, Lotus Sametime, SILC, SIMPLE, and Zephyr.
Pidgin can log in to multiple accounts on multiple IM networks simultaneously. This means that you can be chatting with friends on AIM, talking to a friend on Yahoo Messenger, and sitting in an IRC channel all at the same time. Pidgin supports many features of the various networks, such as file transfer, away messages, and typing notification. It also goes beyond that and provides many unique features. A few popular features are Buddy Pounces, which give the ability to notify you, send a message, play a sound, or run a program when a specific buddy goes away, signs online, or returns from idle; and plugins, consisting of text replacement, a buddy ticker, extended message notification, iconify on away, spell checking, tabbed conversations, and more.
Notes:
Sean: Continuing our schedule of frequent releases, Pidgin 2.1.1 is out. In it, we’ve addressed a lot of UI issues from our experimental new changes introduced in 2.1.0, and gave a lot of attention to Yahoo! and Bonjour. Thanks to everyone who contributed.
Luke: We have reworked some parts of the conversation windows in response to user comments. We did not quite reach 100 tickets closed this release, so a fair few will role over again. Still, we are slowly but surely working our way through the reported bugs. Many thanks to everyone who has helped with tracking down the various issues, testing fixes, and getting patches in.
Tim: Sean finally got me to fix some of the buddy list bugs with Yahoo! when in version 15 mode. So now we have some Yahoo! to MSN support, which is kind of nice. Looks like some others have been contributing to Yahoo! while I’ve been AWOL, so many thanks to them.
Yahoo:
* Added an account action to open your inbox in the yahoo prpl.
* Added support for Unicode status messages in Yahoo.
* Server-stored aliases for Yahoo.
* Fixed support for Yahoo! doodling.
* Limited support for MSN Messenger contactsBonjour:
* Bonjour plugin uses native Avahi instead of Howl
* Bonjour plugin supports Buddy IconsXMPP:
* Only report conversation close when ‘send typing notifications’ preference is turned on
Pidgin:
* Show current outgoing conversation formatting on the font label on the toolbar
* Slim new redesign of conversation tabs to maximize number of conversations that can fit in a window
* Tab bar is not visible when only one conversation is open. You can drag and drop conversations from the infopane.
* Moved “Reset Formatting” toolbar button to Font menu.
* Double click on the infopane to alias buddies and set topics on chats
* New smiley styleFinch:
* Sound support