Adium, the popular free instant messaging app for Mac, has been updated to version 1.4, an update that’s been in the works for more than two years. The new version, which now requires Mac OS X 10.5.8 or later, includes support for Twitter, IRC, comes with improved group chats and group chat bookmarks and also includes hundreds of under-the-hood enhancements and bug fixes.

Adium is without a doubt one of the most used IM applications by Mac users. Thanks to its support for a plethora of IM services and high customization possibilities (you can install plugin and themes to make Adium look and work in a completely different way than the default version, Adium has gained the top spot of must-have apps on every Mac.

Adium 1.4, with Twitter support, aims at becoming the most popular app not just for instant messaging, but for social communication on the whole. Twitter integration, for instance, looks just like your usual IM window: timeline messages are placed inside a group chat, DMs are treated as one-on-one conversations, removing a contact form the buddy list means “unfollowing” him.

While I’m personally not a big fan of the app (I just use iChat), I recognize its importance for million of Mac users who daily depend on multiple online services to stay in touch with their friends and families. Admittedly, this one looks like a great update.

You can go download Adium 1.4 here, or check out the huge changelog below. You’ve been warned: it’s huge.

Version 1.4 (10/31/2010)

Requires Mac OS X 10.5 or later
Added Twitter
Added IRC
Greatly improved group chats and group chat bookmarks
Updated to libpurple 2.6.6 with added fixes
Mind-bogglingly large number of enhancements and bug fixes
Twitter

Timeline messages appear in a group chat, direct messages as a one-on-one chat with a contact.
Adding and removing contact list buddies follows and unfollows them, respectively.
Can customize profile settings (name, location, etc.) from the account edit window.
Settings to customize: Update interval, Adium status updating, retweet links, and contact display in the contact list.
Getting info on a Twitter contact displays all of their information and their latest 20 tweets.
“Reply to a Tweet” window allows for pasting twitter.com URLs to easily respond to a tweet.
Also includes support for StatusNet servers, such as Identi.ca
IRC

Execute commands on connect.
Display of operator status in chats, as well as user’s /away status.
Mass-modify attributes of user list members from the group chat’s action widget below the user list.
Group Chats

When you are mentioned in a group chat, the color of the tab’s message count changes to red.
Set a shortcut of ⌘⌥/ for the “Toggle User List” menu item.
Added a “Toggle User List Side” menu item, defaulting to the user list being on the right. (#8689)
Double-clicking a contact in the group chat user list opens a chat with them.
When double-clicking the resize widget in the user list, don’t show a few pixels of it on the left of the chat.
Respect the “show recent messages” preference for group chats.
Prevent a duplicate separator item in group chat context menus. (#11674)
Added context menus for group chats, including “Add Bookmark”, “Get Info on Bookmark”, “Toggle User List”, and “View Chat Transcripts”.
Support opening chat transcripts for the group chats like a normal chat.
Added a menu item for group chat user lists to add as a contact.
The group chat user list is now sorted by, and displays, operator status in the channels.
The user list remembers its open or closed status per room.
Messages which mention you are no longer grouped with messages from the same user which do not.
Added support for chat topics. Note that message styles must support the feature for them to show up.
Group chats now display online or offline based on their account’s status.
Growl notifications for group chats are now prefixed by the chat’s name.
Added an Advanced Status preference to “Only count number of unread mentions for group chats” (for the Status Menu Item and Dock icon)
Added an option for group chats to hide their join and leave messages.
Joining large group chats is much faster.
Group Chat Bookmarks

Bookmarks no longer trigger events when their account comes online.
Message windows’ tabs and titles now display the alias of the bookmark which represents the chat. (#11756)
Bookmarks are only shown in the list when their accounts are online.
Group chat events such as “You are mentioned”, “Message received” and join/leave events will use the events set on their bookmark.
Set appropriate icons and coloring for bookmarks based on their associated chat information, such as the unviewed content background or flashing.
Fixed bookmarks appearing in groups when groups are disabled, or disappearing.
Bookmarks can now be removed.
Added an option to the Get Info window to auto-join a group chat bookmark when its account connects.
When opening the “Add Contact” window, don’t fill in the username with the name of a bookmark if it selected.
Stops the “retrieving information” spinner from going off for bookmarks.
A group bookmark’s status message now reflects how many unread mentions or messages are in the chat.
Correctly sorted the groups list in the “Add Bookmark” window.
Fixed bookmarking group chats whose names vary in case.
Contacts

Added support for contacts in multiple groups (#500)
Hold option when dragging to add a contact to a secondary group.
Contact info inspector is now more focused on groups per contact than before.
Created a new Authorization Requests window
Authorization requests no longer create one alert panel per request.
The authorization requests window has add, ignore, and deny toolbar and context menu items.
Fixed deleting a group not removing its contents.
Corrected adding contacts to multiple accounts. The “Add Contact” window was only adding to the existing account.
Added account-specific menu items (such as “Initiate Multi-User Chat” or “Initiate Direct IM”) to the main menu’s Contact menu.
Corrected a bug where a combined contact would be “always visible” and toggling the preference would not unset it.
Reduced complexity when determining what account is preferred for messaging a given contact. (#10547)
The tune tooltip is now displayed for any contact in a meta contact which supports it. (#11122)
Logging

You can now replace Logs folder with an alias to another folder (on, say, an encrypted disk image). (#992)
Search terms in the Transcript Viewer now match any part of text unless a wildcard is used. (#6364)
Sped up writing log files in certain situations.
Corrected some situations where the log viewer lacked icons for group chats.
Events such as Direct IM status, joins and parts, and other information are now logged and displayed in the log viewer.
Increased the maximum amount of recent messages you can display for chats from 100 to 400.
Added an Import option to reindex the logs folder in case you manually add logs. (#9554)
Contact List

Contact list filtering is now present on all window styles: regular, borderless, etc. (#10489)
Corrected a few bugs where contacts were hidden as offline when online, or placed in the offline group incorrectly.
Combined contacts now show the information in the contact list for the first available user. (#11007)
Improved speed of searching in contact list for larger lists.
Fixed a small white line at the top of the contact list when “size to fit vertically” is set. (#11119)
Added “Sort Groups Alphabetically” option to the status sort.
Added “Hide Away Contacts” and “Hide Contacts for Account” to the view options.
Fixed a bug where the view menu would show incorrect settings.
Status message is no longer searched when searching the contact list.
Fixed a lot of drag and drop bugs, such as being able to drag a group into another group.
Tooltips now display for collapsed groups. (#11951)
The group count is no longer always displayed for collapsed contacts.
“Show Group Visible Count” has been returned to “Show Group Online Count”, and counts only online, visible contacts. (#11362)
Status icons packs can now specify “Idle and Away” icons for contacts. (#872)
Pressing left-arrow when selecting an item will select its parent item if it’s not expanded, like Finder.
Message Styles

You can now specify a different style for group chats, and customize all of the preferences independently of a regular chat. (#87)
Messages containing unordered lists are now displayed using bullets.
Improved the appearance and function of built-in message styles.
Corrected sorting of message styles in the preferences. (#9498)
Numerous improvements for style developers:
Styles now fall back to root level files for Status.html and Content.html. (#10868)
%message% is now replaced in a loop as we do other keywords. (#9672)
%service% is now replaced in all templates, not just messages. (#11872)
%senderPrefix% now contains a textual representation (., @, %, +, or an empty string) of the user’s status in a group chat. (#11882)
%userIconPath% is now a valid replacement keyword in Status.html (#7508)
Added “action” to the %messageClasses% of /me messages. (#11894)
Messaging

Messages from blocked contacts are now never displayed, even if the protocol allows them to send the message.
Added marking to the scroll bar like in Colloquy:
When your name (or what you decide to highlight) is mentioned in a chat, a grey line is added.
When the window or tab loses focus, a red line is added and you can “Jump to Focus Mark” to easily go to it.
You can access the “Jump to Previous Mark”, “Jump to Next Mark” and “Jump to Focus Mark” by right-clicking the scroll bar, or from the new Display menu.
Added “Clear Display” to the new Display menu.
When cycling chats (using “Next Chat” and “Previous Chat”) stay in the current window. (#6346)
You can now customize the text which causes the “You are mentioned” event to fire from the advanced preferences.
Fixed a bug where emoticons would be displayed improperly. (#6440)
Added a confirmation dialog when clicking the block/unblock icon in the toolbar. (#10960)
Added a URL shortener. Select the URL, then either choose “Replace with Shortened URL” from the Edit menu, right-click the URL and choose it from that menu, right-click a link and choose it from that menu, or press ⇧⌘K. Supports TinyURL, is.gd, tr.im, and Metamark (xrl.us).
Added an image uploader. Select the image, then either choose “Replace with Uploaded Image” from the Edit menu, right-click the image and choose it from that menu, right-click a link and choose it from that menu, or press ⌥⌘K.
Added an option to only count mentions for group chats when badging the dock or status menu item. (#11850)
Fixed clicking service links with message text when the link appears in the window it would open.
When a new file transfer arrives which requires confirmation, the chat’s unviewed content count is increased.
A new message no longer unminimizes the chat window. (#52)
Added an “only count number of unread mentions” for group chat tabs in the Messages advanced preferences.
Added an optional confirmation when closing a window which has multiple tabs, either always or when at least one has unviewed messages. (#12006)
Message styles can now be updated without relaunching Adium.
Nudge and buzz messages now appear as events in the window instead of messages from the contact.
Fixed logging in St. John’s Newfoundland’s time zone. (#9557)
Fixed detecting Right-to-Left status for a number of languages, including Arabic. (#13612)
Prevent en-dash and em-dash from breaking URL parsing. (#11490)
Fixed clicking on links whose messages contain ‘[’ and a percent-escape such as %20.
Fixed a bug when reading logs. (#8141)
Fixed behavior regarding the substitutions preferences for Snow Leopard (such as “smart quotes”, “smart dashes”, spelling auto-correction, etc.)
Fixed iChat emoticons not working on Snow Leopard (#12369).
Accounts

Fixed setting a global user icon. Previously, if you didn’t have an account icon set but did set a global one, you would have no icon.
Changed behavior for account options: a lot were only changing when reconnecting, now all that are able to (i.e., non-connect options) take affect immediately.
Fixed using a PAC-specified proxy for the hostname of the account. (#224)
Bonjour

Bonjour accounts now disconnect if we receive an error message.
XMPP (Jabber, Google Talk, etc.)

Updated XMPP server list when registering.
History from persistent group chats is now displayed as such and does not trigger events. (#6787)
Group chats which are not anonymous now display the actual contact in the user list. (#11841)
Fixed receiving colors and fonts from iChat. (#1323)
Enabled support for custom emoticons as an account option defaulting to on.
Fixed joining a group chat from an xmpp URL. (#11785)
“Not Authorized” is now displayed as a status message for contacts for whom you need to request authoriation.
Contacts are no longer told when you close their chat (“…has left the conversation”). (#8082)
Added a preference for file transfer proxies, defaulting to “proxy.eu.jabber.org.”
Added a “BOSH Server” option for XMPP accounts. (#12844)
Fixed a security issue where “Require SSL/TLS” for XMPP was being ignored.
MSN

Possibly fixed a crash on connect. (#11508)
Fixes setting account-specific display names (only the global display name would be set).
Enabled server-side storing of contact aliases. (#11802)
Fixed displaying what message was unable to be sent when an error occurs. (#11796)
Moved the “display custom emoticons” to an account preference from the advanced preferences window.
Updated libpurple to fix a vulnerability in MSN. ( http://www.coresecurity.com/content/libpurple-arbitrary-write)
AIM, ICQ, and MobileMe

Added “Connect using SSL” as a default option for AIM and ICQ. (#9553) You can get information on the certificate by right-clicking the account in the Accounts preferences.
Added a preference to always use the AOL proxy server for file transfers and direct IM. (#11413)
MySpace IM

Added support for msim links. (#8036)
Yahoo

Fixed a wide variety of service errors.
QQ

Restored connectivity.
Zephyr

Disabled Zephyr. As an unsupported protocol, we require patches to maintain it in working order. At this point in time, it just crashes. If you would like to contribute and maintain working Zephyr support, please contact us.
Chat Transcripts

Added a confirmation before removing logs with the delete key. (#13097)
Fixed incorrectly logging links containing ampersands (&) which caused logs to appear blank in the log viewer.
Miscellaneous

Improved launch time
You can now define which applications should be the default for different services in the Advanced preferences. (#158)
Updated the look of the file transfer window. Added a keyboard shortcut of CMD+. to stop the selected transfer.
Improved multiple icons throughout Adium
The about box credits are now scrollable. (#9967)
The unread count is now cleared when clearing the display. (#10605)
Error and information display windows no longer exceed their maximum height, and take focus when opening. (#11793).
Fixed support for a proxy auto-config (PAC) file. (#224, #11364)
Disabled the “Show # recent messages in new chats” option when “Log messages” is off. (#11359)
Menu items such as “Show Offline Contacts” now always use the “Show” verb, with a checkbox indicating that they’re currently shown. Previous versions indicated that by changing the verb to “Hide”. #4740.
Added “Contact went mobile” and “Contact returns from mobile” events. (#3248)
Fixed AppleScript erroring when creating a new status object. (#8863)
Greatly reduced memory usage when receiving lots of messages while Adium is inactive
Idle contacts now resort immediately.
Fixed the uptime script for single-user logins. (#10747)
The Downloads stack now bounces when a file transfer completes.
Moved dock icon and status menu item controls to a new “Message Alerts” advanced preferences.
Added throttling to Growl messages. Instead of, for example, posting 296 messages, Adium will Growl “296 messages”.
Cleaned up the look of the advanced preferences list.
Updated to Sparkle 1.5 for improved notification and installation of future updates
Localization

Added Ukrainian and Slovakian translations
Updated and improved other translations