Fire
Current Version: 1.0.4 (October 23, 2004) / 1.5.6 (February 16, 2006)
Please note: Fire has officially been discontinued as of February 23, 2007. The authors note: "We are saddened to announce that there will be no future versions of Fire. There are several reasons for this end, but the most notable is the loss of developers. Fire's development had dwindled to few developers who do not wish to continue the project alone. In addition, another major contributing factor is the fact that all but one of Fire's IM libraries is no longer in active development. The good news is that two of Fire's developers have joined the Adium team and have written a transition path. Adium 1.0, upon first launch, will import your Fire accounts, away messages, groups, buddies, and logs into Adium. For future updates and IM needs, we suggest that you look at Adium." However, the latest released version of Fire will continue to be available. More...
Fire is a free, attractive, multi-protocol instant messaging service for Mac OS X (written in Cocoa, Mac OS X's native programming environment). Currently, Fire handles AIM, ICQ, MSN, IRC, Jabber, and Yahoo! Pager protocols. Fire benefits from all the work that has been done on Linux to support these protocols; the "services" Fire provides are built off of open source/GNU Public License software libraries written for Linux, and compiled into a nice, attractive OS X front end. This is among the first of many pieces of software that will undoubtedly be brought to the OS X platform this way. Version 1.5.6 (for Mac OS X 10.2 and later only) makes the following changes:
- Fixed Jabber connection problems.
- Seem to have finally fixed the speech crash bug. It seems Apple's documentation is not quite correct.
- Fixed rearrangement of groups through dragging.
- Adium-style tabs dragging fixed.
- Speed up automatic translations.
- Buddy Text Encodings are saved for irc and ICQ conversations.
- Spotlight Importer - Added more detail info about files to import. This should help the importer to actually work.
User Reviews
"One of the first native messaging clients for Mac OS X, this program - although still far from beta - fills the bill nicely. The best feature is that it is not another messaging standard; rather, it supports AOL IM, Yahoo, and ICQ messenger services in one program. That's right - chat with all of your contacts across three IM services with one program and one on-line buddy list. A must have for OS X users and it will only get better. MSN support is planned as well. Freeware."
—Steven Major
"Being relatively new to Macintosh and to Macintosh applications, I was pleasantly surprised to find this one, Fire, an instant messaging client made specifically for Macintosh OS X. Fire is indeed an attractive program which allows the user to connect to all of the major networks, as well as import your contacts from lesser known programs (Adium, etc.). You can also use encryption for all your instant messaging if you so desire. I am absolutely thrilled with this program, though due to faults not of its own, sometimes connecting with "certain" networks is more difficult than others. It is an application that I use on a daily basis. I have never understood why people who use this application find time to find its faults...sure, it can be an inconvenience, but the creator of this program has it under active development, and it's FREE. I love this thing!."
—Paul Bowers
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the Mac OS X 10.1 (Cocoa) version (1.0.4).
to the Fire source code page for source code downloads.Also See . . .
Can't find what you're looking for? Try a search:
Also, if you have an older Mac, be sure to check out the "Classic" applications page for more options.
Finally, take a look at ALEMIA if you think you know that name of an application, but aren't quite sure.
Also Consider . . .
These are applications that are newer and of potential interest, but which I haven't yet selected for permanent inclusion. Have a look, and let me know if you think they deserve to be part of the permanent collection!