Smashing Birds!

Yay! As it seems a group of people finally recognized what crap Pidgin really is and started a new project for a new multi-protocol instant messaging client for the GNOME Desktop! Galaxium! is…

… an instant messenger application designed for the GNOME desktop. It will allow you to connect to MSN, Jabber, GTalk and IRC (and Yahoo, AIM and ICQ in the future) through the use of addins. You can communicate with your family, friends and co-workers from around the world, using different networks!

And the best thing is, that it uses the Mono Toolkit and the MonoDevelop IDE for development! I tested out Galaxium a bit and must say that it’s a pretty good start. The User Interface isn’t that simple and intuitive but now it already supports the main features like multiple accounts, setting per-account profiles, file-transfers and even proxy support. Unfortunatelly it doesn’t let me select whether I’d like to use no proxy, the GNOME Proxy settings or a manually defined proxy, what makes it hard for me to use the application in everyday work – but I’ve already file a bug about this.
However, besides its functionallity Galaxium also looks cool since providing the feature to use Adium Message-Themes! I’ll track the project curiously and participate by filing bugs and maybe also patches. I’ve been waiting for a really long time for a Pidgin alternative, but unfortunatelly every project until now died of starvation.
However, we’ll see…