Pidgin, previously known as Gaim, is a multi-protocol instant messaging client for Linux, BSD, MacOS X, and Windows. Pidgin messenger is compatible with AIM and ICQ (Oscar protocol), MSN Messenger, Yahoo!, IRC, Jabber, SILC, Gadu-Gadu, GroupWise Messenger, and Zephyr networks.
Pidgin users can log in to multiple accounts on multiple IM networks simultaneously. This means that you can be chatting with friends on AOL Instant Messenger, 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, typing notification, and MSN window closing 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.
Pidgin runs on a number of platforms, including Windows, Linux, and Qtopia (Sharp Zaurus and iPaq).
Pidgin integrates well with GNOME 2 and KDE 3.1's system tray, as well as Windows's own system tray. This allows you to work with Pidgin without requiring the buddy list window to be up at all times.
Pidgin is under constant development, and releases are usually frequent. The latest news regarding Pidgin can be found on the news page.
What's New in This Release:
libpurple:
· Treat AIM Unicode messages as UTF-16 rather than UCS-2; this should have no functional effect, other than continued support on systems which have dropped UCS-2 conversions.
· Add support for setting buddy icons on Gadu-Gadu (Tomasz Salacinski)
· Fix a crash when clearing the buddy icon for an account on XMPP
· Fix a crash during login for some ICQ accounts
· Prefer more available resources on XMPP when priorities are equal
· Fix incorrectly marking some Yahoo! contacts as blocked
· Improved handling of UTF-8 group names on ICQ (beret)
· Fix a crash when starting if you have a Zephyr account
· Increase XMPP ping timeout to 120 seconds, to prevent poor network connections from timing out unnecessarily.
· Don't crash on XMPP forms with empty default values.
· Fix issues with CHAP authentication for SOCKS5 proxies.
· Fix cross-compiling for Win32 when using GCC 4.x
Pidgin:
· Remove a workaround for older versions gstreamer that was causing crashes on some non-Linux systems such as HPUX
· Fix some cases of the conversation input entry area being 1 pixel high
· Fix for displaying channel & buddy names in conversation window when they have "&" in them
· Some memory leak fixes, especially in the Text Replacement plugin
· Rectangular but non-square buddy icons have rounded corners in the buddy list
Finch:
· Fix compiling with Glib older than 2.6
· Ensure existing conversations selected from the "Send IM" dialog are given focus
· Move the tooltip on the left of the buddylist if there's not enough room on the right to show it.
