Ondrej Holzman When you think of an IM (instant messaging) client for Mac, most users think of a legend among legends - the Adium application, which first appeared 12 years ago. And although the developers are still supporting it and releasing new updates, the ravages of time have taken quite a toll on it. No big changes and news are coming, rather fixes and patches. Therefore, it has a relatively promising chance to come to the forefront of the Flamingo application, which is a breath of fresh air in the forgotten field of desktop "cheats"…
However, it is questionable whether users still desire native clients for various communication services. Most people use the most popular Facebook either directly in the web interface or on their mobile devices, so they often don't even need to install desktop clients like in the days of ICQ. However, there are still those who prefer a quality application over a web interface, and for them there is, for example, Adium or the new Flamingo.
For starters, it should be clear that Flamingo has a much narrower scope than Adium, only supporting Facebook, Hangouts/Gtalk and XMPP (formerly Jabber). So, if you use any other services than the ones mentioned above, Flamingo is not for you, but for a regular user such an offer should be sufficient.
Flamingo comes with a modern look and feel, something that can appeal to existing Adium users. It has endless possibilities when applying different skins, but you won't change the concept of the application itself. And while mobile apps are evolving by leaps and bounds, Adium is increasingly reminiscent of the work of the last decade.
Everything in Flamingo takes place within a single window divided into three sections. In the first part from the left is the list of your friends who are online, in the next panel you see the list of conversations and in the third the conversation itself takes place. The default view of the first panel is that you only see the faces of your friends, however when you move the mouse over it, the names are also displayed.
Contacts are sorted by service, and you can star selected contacts so that they are always displayed at the top. A great advantage of Flamingo is unified contacts, which means that the application will automatically combine friends you have on Facebook and Hangouts into one contact and will always offer you to send a message to the service on which the user is currently available. You can thus see the conversation from Facebook and Hangouts in a single window, and at the same time you can also switch between the individual services yourself.
It has been said that Flamingo consists of one window, however this is only the basis, it does not always have to be this way. Individual conversations or groups of conversations can also be opened in a new window, as well as having several conversations open next to each other.
The key part of the chat application is the communication itself. This is conducted in Flamingo as well as in iOS, for example, in bubbles, while each conversation is accompanied by a kind of timeline, on which the service through which you connect and the time stamps of various events are recorded at the beginning.
Sending files is handled intuitively. Just take the file and drag it into the conversation window, and the application will take care of the rest. On the one hand, Flamingo can send files directly (it works with iMessage, Adium and other clients), and if such a connection is not possible, you can connect CloudApp and Droplr services to the application. Flamingo then uploads the file to them and sends a link to the other party. Again a fully automated affair.
If you send images or links to YouTube or Twitter, Flamingo will create a preview of them directly in the conversation, which we can see from some mobile applications. Instagram or the aforementioned CloudApp and Droplr are also supported.
I see a big advantage over the Adium application, where I always had a problem with it, in the search. This is handled really well in Flamingo. You can search across all conversations, but also sort them by date or by content (files, links, etc.). Above all, it is important that the search is functional. If you then use notifications through notifications in Mavericks, you can respond to new messages directly from the notification bubble.
When it comes to real-world use of Facebook and Hangouts, Flamingo can't cope due to the limitations of both services with group conversations (even with XMPP). At the same time, they cannot send images natively via Flamingo, in the sense that if you send an image to someone on Facebook, it will be sent to them via CloudApp, for example. Unfortunately, the Flamingo developers failed to solve another thing that bothers me about Adium. If you read a message in Flamingo, the application does not reflect this in any way, i.e. it does not send this information to Facebook, so the web interface still shows that you have an unread message. You won't get rid of it until you reply to it or manually mark it as read.
Despite these slight ailments, I dare to say that Flamingo can very playfully replace Adium, as a more elegant and modern application that goes with the times and will offer almost everything that Facebook and Hangouts users need. Nine euros is not the smallest investment, but on the other hand, you use such an application practically all the time. In addition, the developers have promised that they plan to come up with many improvements in the future. This is only the first result of ten months of work. In particular, small fixes and optimizations should come initially, which is needed, because now sometimes when switching to Flamingo you have to wait a few seconds for the application to update the list of online users.
[app url=”https://itunes.apple.com/cz/app/flamingo/id728181573?ls=1&mt=12″]
That price is a bit overblown... I would give them 1-2 euros max for it. I can do exactly what I want to do with it with any other IM tool.
Why pay for something I have within the system? Jabber handles iMessage without problems. Facebook chat is a Jabber protocol and can be easily set up in imessage. The same goes for Hangouts.