Most people I know and meet use AOL’s Instant Messenger service. I can’t explain why to you. It just happened that way. It was actually thrilling to me when AOL first released its free IM client for the Mac OS. I could chat for free with all my friends on AOL (you know, when people actually paid them money for stuff). As time went on, they added more and more features that just added bloat to what should be a fast communication mechanism.
One of the reasons I jumped into Mac OS X was that I wanted to use Fire.app. Adium was released some time after that and I jumped on that bandwagon. The truth is that by that time, AIM had turned into a gaudy piece of software with more dead UI space than any application I’d ever seen. Adium made IM clean again. Then Apple released iChat and reinforced the bond between my contacts and AIM. Thing is, none of my Mac using friends actually use AOL’s client anymore. It seemed all but abandoned.
Apparently, they didn’t so much abandon it as decide to start from scratch as part of creating “AIM Lite”. They’ve trimmed out a lot of the cruft (excellent start). That said, the new preview version (warning: direct download link) is really rough around the edges. Interface elements don’t desensitize when unavailable, mundane tasks seem slow, and it crashed a horrible death on quit for me.
I like where they seem to be starting with this new imagining of an AIM client, but it leaves me really curious about where it’s going to end up.
It's great that they're redoing AIM, but who will use it? No one I know subscribes to AOL anymore.
Oh my goodness; they need to hire a good UI designer...
@Darren: last time I checked, you didn't need to subscribe to AOL for AIM.
I look forward to checking this out. as entrenched as I am to Adium, I have a soft spot for native chat clients.
Why on Earth one may need to register AIMCC key? The application displays an alert on launch which says: "The AIMCC key is unknown or empty." I tried to register it on http://developer.aim.com, but no use.