I love Adium, which is a Mac multi-network IM client. Today saw the release of Adium X 1.3, which added some essential features, which have been missing for some time.

One of these missing features which this version adds is particularly useful for me: MSN personal messages. MSN is the most popular IM protocol in the UK and this, therefore, is particularly important. Ever since my switch to OS X, I’ve been missing the ability to see people’s personal messages (whether it be their status, their juicy gossip or their wit). In fact, the only way I could view them before was using a single-network MSN client, like aMSN or Microsoft Messenger, or this dated, homebrewed and unreliable custom build of Adium. Adium achieves this by using the msn-pecan plug-in for its library, libpurple (the library it was in common with Pidgin).

Another useful option is adding a search option to contact lists, allowing you to quickly get someone’s email address or quickly provide the IM address of a buddy to another buddy.

The new version also adds support for Facebook IM, MobileMe, several new icons, redesigns the ‘Get Info’ option on contacts to be more Inspector-like and performance upgrades.

Adium 1.3 supports Adium’s position as the prime OS X chat client and adds some much needed features and in general just makes Adium much more intuitive.

Adium 1.3 will run on a Mac with OS X 10.4.0 or higher.

(Direct download link)