As promised, today brings a new addition of "Pimp your App". The target? The beloved multi-protocol chat application, Adium. I can't think of any other app that really encourages customization as much as Adium, so while I'll be recommending various modifications available on the Adium Xtras site, I knew this Pimp your App had to include something else special. So of course, as many of you readers know, in an interview earlier in the week, Adium icon artist Adam Betts promised to release an updated application icon along with other goodies today. And I think you'll agree that he delivered in spades once you see what he came up with.

Now, just an important disclaimer here. Remember, these recommendations are based on my personal tastes. Believe it or not, this means that these recommendations may not match your own. If you have other favorites to suggest, I welcome you to post links to the relevant AdiumXtras page in the comments sectons for others to enjoy.

Additional note: It is highly recommended to download the latest Adium 1.0 beta if you'd like the results to look optimal. (They've done a lot of general UI tweaking with this new release, impressive stuff.)

So, without dilly-dallying any further, let the pimping begin!

The application icon

The Adium duck has a lot of history, a lot of fans, and a lot of haters among the app's 600,000 estimated users. But the fact is, it's just about the only application on OS X that has achived true "mascot" status, and for that reason, when I mentioned to some Adium developers that Adam was working on an updated icon, they immediately emphasized not to make-over the duck too greatly. I agree with that since for the duck haters there are plenty of great alternatives, including the popular iBubble by my designer friend Iiro Jappinen. So Adam went hard to work on updating the duck while preserving its good looks, and I think the result speaks for itself. Introducing the sharper, cleaner, beautified Adiumy (new on right):

Now, the Adium duck has over the years acquired quite a wardrobe, not to mention several different colored coats of feathers, so a focus for Adam was making the new icon work with these modifications relatively painlessly, and be very easy to recolor. You can see the initial lineup of colors below, and can expect a tutorial and PSD on his site later today:

Click Here to download. To use the colored ducks, double click on the .Adiumicon files in the "Dock icons" folder of the download, and you can install them from within the app. The "away" and "idle" sign posts can be dropped into the "Shared Dock Icon Images" folder within Adium's resources. (Control click Adium, select "show package contents", navigate to the "resources" folder).

Moving on... to the preferences

As I mentioned in the interview and my about page, one of the first projects I was involved with was Adium, and my major contribution was working with the talented icon artist Jasper Hauser on its preference icons. However, as the years passed, Jasper has improved considerably in his talents but most of the original preference icons have stayed. Adam sought to improve the situation with a new set of icons, emphasizing the rather distinctive character of the app. (Click thumb to enlarge.)

The results are sharper, more consistent in style, and in my opinion, brings quite a bit of character to the window.

Click Here to download. Drop all included files into Adium's resources folder (control click Adium, select "show package contents", navigate to the "resources" folder). If you're just giving this a spin, I would recommend keeping a backup of the app handy to revert. IMPORTANT: If you are going to apply the Silkadium icons coming up ahead, do that first, or do not replace the pref icons if you apply Silkadium after these.

What's in your quacking menu?

Adium includes a pretty solid menubar item, used for status switching, selecting ongoing conversations, and viewing unread message status in a glance. However, Adam noticed that they didn't quite match the colors of the rest of the systemwide menu items. In addition, he felt that the icon took a bit too much space. So he fixed it. Just drop these into your resouces folder to install, and enjoy a very subtle improvement in the upper right corner of your screen.

Click Here to download. Drop all included files into Adium's resources folder to install.

This article is starting to make me smile. (Or cry, or grow a foot in my mouth.)

I'm sure we've all wondered at one point whether Adiumy can display any other expressions than wide-eyed staring, sleeping, and agitated flapping. Adam also recently released a pretty awesome Adium duck-themed smiley set on his site, previewed below. Visit his blog post to grab them.

Wait, you forgot the message window toolbar icons.

No I didn't. While Adam didn't redo them for this feature, there is a set both he and I would like to recommend. Adium user Leo Lin created a pretty cool message window icon set based on the Silk icons by Mark James and Apple's new capsule style Mail buttons, called SilkAdium (Download Here). Yeah, yeah, I know a lot of you, er, dislike those. But if you do, by all means continue to use the built-in icons. They do the job. The rest of us can enjoy these rather awesome blue gel capsules:

What about the chats themselves?

Adium generates the chatview using Webkit, which basically translates into very very powerful and relatively easy customization. (Are you a web coder? You have the skillz then.) So anyhow, there are a whole bunch of message styles on the Xtras site, ranging from Safari RSS and iChat clones to the crazier Pushpin and h4x0r. But out of all of these, what's my personal favorite? Ironically, I've found Modern the most pleasant to use (especially with the previous mods), ironic because it is one of Adium's competitor's default view (Proteus). But it's all good. Smooth, simple, elegant. I like.

Last but not least...

The status icons for the buddy list. (No, I didn't forget buddy list styles, I just like to keep mine the way it is.) What's up for recommendation? If you're looking for something aqualicious but with some character, I heartily recommend Iiro once again. This time, it's his iBubble Status Icons as shown on the right. The status icons not only show up in your buddy list, but will also be overlayed on your menu item for say, new messages, so keep that in mind.

Another recommendation is the for those iChat switchers out there is Cez's Chat Gems, pretty much taken straight from iChat AV in Tiger. Sometimes, iChat ain't so bad, and these status icons look really good if you've been following this guide so far, with a little blue speech bubble for new messages, and the green phone badge for mobile users. Pretty much what you'd expect, and does the trick.

That finishes it up...

Theres plenty of more xtras out there, so if you enjoyed this guide, I definitely encourage you to explore the site and fine tune (or rebuild) this setup to your tastes. Hope you enjoyed, and be sure to post your setups and recommendations in the comments! Until next time... QUACK.