Due to some on going legal hassles from AOL, Gaim, which was a derived from AOL’s “AOL Instant Messenger”, has been renamed to Pidgin. Shouldn’t be any legal hassles there, unless of course, some Lionel Hutz like trial-lawyer tries to figure out how to get money from the project maintainers.

My initial impressions are pretty good. The interface is smoother, the GTK theme looks clean, and tight, and all of the good plugins, like Gaim-Encryption and Guificaitons have been updated to reflect the new project. Also, Google has already updated it’s IM client “Talk” website to reflect the new Pidgin Jabber interface. Here are the instructions. The one really big disappointment is that video and voice support seem to be no where in sight. No word when these features may be added, if ever. Seems like it might be a monumental task to add, especially considering Pidgin’s cross platform support. Wish these additions would make it into the Google Summer of Code sponsorship list. Apple’s iChat is phenomenally easy to use, and well integrated with video and voice capability, however, in typical fashion, iChat is OS X only. Video and Voice support are the only major features that Gaim lacks, and have those would close the gap with the other proprietary clients out there.