On Friday, a coworker/friend and I played with Coccinella's newer functionality to try it out.  Very impressive!  First, we played with the new Jingle support.  His Mac audio hardware was having some problems so he ended up switching to his Windows box while I used my Mac.  We had some initial problems getting a call started, but in the end it worked out great.  (turned out we had some things poorly configured, like input devices and such)  I was using an iSight and he had .. well honestly I don't know what kind of microphone he had.  Either way, after the first call everything was working great.  His voice quality wasn't coming through very well.  Mine was apparantly coming through great.  We chalked this up to bad microphone on his end.  Then we tried using a whiteboard with the chat and that went pretty well.  Overall, the whole thing was pretty fun.  I recall finding a couple of things "flaky" and having to restart coccinella a couple of times, but then again the Jingle support is very new.  It was a tad confusing to look at the preferences dialog and see .. what was it... IAX?  Whatever it was, it was unclear whether we had to configure that or not until we just tried it.  =)  (turned out we didn't)

We then got another involved with Coccinella on another Mac and a conference room.  We quickly discovered that voice chat support didn't work here, but that was not surprising.  We did find out that whiteboarding works for more than 2 people.  That was very cool.  We did not try chatting between Coccinella and another chat client that supported Jingle.  We had other things to do.  ;D  But hey, it's certainly a fun client to play with.  It's actually the client of choice for said coworker/friend.  =)

I'm still pretty attached to Adium myself.  I have determined that the major things keeping me with it that often keep me away from other clients are:

1. Meta-Contacts

2. Tie-in with Apple Address Book

3. Pretty  =)  (good themes and such)

4. Good keyboard navigation

5. Lets me log in to multiple Jabber servers at the same time

6. Groupchat support

7. Not flaky  ;D

There are plenty of things I wish it had that it does NOT have, but none of those things effect my day to day use of a chat client.  Note that many clients support most of these, but each one of them is missing something key from the list.  (also note that #3 isn't -that- important to me, but it does have an effect)  Psi is damn close to being a favorite client (latest dev).  Perhaps someday I'll explain these in more detail.  (ie, why they're all so important to me)  And also list things I wish Adium had.  Would be nice if I had the kinda free time that would let me actually offer patches to add the support I want too.  Whee!

Just generally playing around with some clients, I rather dig Coccinella and Spark.

Spark is very cute and has a fairly nice interface.  It's "missing" some functionality here and there, but it's very young and has a nice plugin architecture that I was playing around with.  The login screen is a little on the ugly side, but then how often are you going to be looking at the login screen?  My only problem with it so far has been that it doesn't seem to like to log into my home servers for some reason.  Still trying to work that issue out.  I like how Coccinella has it's disco browser under a tab and, using plugins, I can do that with Spark to.  (ie, if I write that functionality)  Which is one thing I was working in for fun over the weekend.

Coccinella seems very feature right and has a wonderfully fun Whiteboard functionality.  It's also a very cute look and feel and it's Tcl/Tk-ness makes it very cross platform functional.  It's possible that the only reason I would -not- switch to this as my primary jabber client is that it doesn't 100% behave under OS X.  For example, periodically I have some major issues dealing with it's scrollbars.  Like they won't "pull" for me.  I have to click on parts of the scrollbar to get to where I need to go.  Likewise, it doesn't really keep a feel for it's last window positioning that I can see, so every time I start it up I have to pull the windows into the locations I want them in.  That one's not all that big a deal, but still.  Anyway, it's really quite nice.  =)