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.
Sean: 2.2.0 contains the results of several major Google Summer of Code branches bringing some new, extraordinary features. We have a new protocol, MySpaceIM, a bunch of new features for an existing protocol, XMPP, and nifty new certificate management to make sure your IM server is who it says it is.
Ka-Hing: A number of you noticed crashes when dragging windows around when certain options are enabled. Well, that was my fault, and Sadrul fixed it. So Props to him and poos to me. I haven’t done much for this release, but the next one should contain something that I helped work on. Hint: students are cheap slave coders!
Kevin: I haven’t really been coding much in Pidgin, and this release is no exception, but I will be working on getting our wonderful web site to be a little more functional by next release. I promise!
Libpurple:
* New protocol plugin: MySpaceIM (Jeff Connelly, Google Summer of Code)
* XMPP enhancements. See here. (Andreas Monitzer, Google Summer of Code for Adium)
* Certificate management. Libpurple will validate certificates on SSL-encrypted protocols (William Ehlhardt, Google Summer of Code)
* Some adjustments were made to fix sending messages when using the MSN HTTP method. (Laszlo Pandy)
* Yahoo! Chat is fixed.
* Some AIM file transfer issues between Pidgin and other clients have been fixed. (Kyryll A Mirnenko)
* Properly restore idle status and time for AIM and ICQ accounts when they reconnect after being disconnected.Pidgin:
* Insert Horizontal Rules and Strikethrough text from toolbar.
* Option to show protocol icons in the buddy list, from the Buddies > Show menu. (Justin Heiner)
* Ability to build with native, non-X11 GTK+ on OSX. (Anders Hasselqvist)
* Remember the ‘Enable Sounds’ setting for a conversation.
* Right-clicking the empty space in the formatting toolbar allows you to toggle back to the old “ungrouped” version.
* Protocols supporting account registration via Pidgin now show a descriptive checkbox instead of a vague “Register” button.
* Fixed a bug where a tab would be shown on single conversations when tabs were disabled.Finch:
* Per-conversation mute and logging options (accessible from the menu).
Downloading it. Hopefully they got rid of the focus steal this time.
They’re not only washing themselves once a month, they also refuse to FIX THE FOCUS STEAL IN WINDOWS XP.