Fire for Chat on the Mac
Apr 25th, 2006 by Karen
Recently I started using Fire for chatting with people on my Mac. Up until this point I’ve been using iChat. However, I haven’t figured out how to set up iChat to work with Yahoo Messenger. Supposedly you can do this with Jabber but I haven’t been able to do it yet. Plus, iChat does natively support IRC and since I’ve been spending time lurking in the #code4lib channel, I need a way to do IRC. I checked out Adium but it doesn’t support IRC either so I found that my best bet was Fire.
Previously I’d been using iChat for IMing and Colloquy for IRC. While this works it is a pain and not nearly as easy as using a single client. With Fire I can do everything in one client. One thing to note is that setting up IRC channels in Fire is a little tricky. There are directions in the Fire FAQs.
However, here is my summary. First you need to create yourself a IRC account. This is done by going to “Accounts” and add an IRC account. Put the nickname you want to display in the “Nick” field and the server you want to connect to in the “Server” field (irc.freenode.net for example). Save the account and then connect. Next, add the channel you want to participate in as a IRC buddy. Make the buddy name the channel name (code4lib for example) without the #. Once you have done this you won’t be able to see who is on the channel until you double-click on the channel name. This will open a group chat window that shows everyone on the channel as well as what is going on on the channel.
The big downside to using a multi-protocol client like Fire is that you can’t to audio or video chat. Both Fire and Adium are working on adding support for this in multiple services (Yahoo, VoIP), in fact there is an plugin for Adium that will provide VoIP support via the Gizmo Project. I’d like to have the best of all worlds: meaning audio and video chat in a multi-protocol client. Until I can find better directions for how to make IRC and Yahoo work in iChat, I’ll be using Fire.
