Fire rocked. It may be dead, it's true. It still rocked.

There were some odd things about fire... like how you opened up a chatroom with a name in Yahoo, and how even if anyone used the same name to create a chatroom in Yahoo Chat, you'd never see their posts and they wouldn't see your posts. You had to invite them to the chat. No other chat program on Mac could do that with yahoo chat rooms. Maybe it was a bug, but it sure was nice.

Of course, Yahoo chat is isn't the same these days, and Adium is more directed towards easily making encrypted communication than they were prior to the Fire project dying, but still, it was a nice program.

Fire is officially dead (I'm not on the team, just reposting it here):

"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.

Just discovered great feature: say you're running several different chats in different languages, i.e., using different keyboard layouts/inputs, Fire remembers them per window! Fantastic! Kudos!

The following reasons are why I switched to Fire from Adium (i.e., these are advantages _over_ Adium):

1) Fire has commands for Connect to All [Protocols] and Disconnect from All

2) Fire can automatically reconnect to services upon wake.

3) Fire is smarter about Keychain access (Adium can spawn a lot of Keychain access request dialog boxes).

i've been using fire for two months now and i am incredibly pleased. i'm using it to replace YM and iChat and it does all that they do and so much more. it is a better YM client that Yahoo's own program, which is crippled on the mac.

the basic functionality (chat) is solid. i've had only two strange issues: one time some formatted text was not received when sent, and one time it kept saying my friend was typing when she was not.

the advanced features are outrageously cool. spell check while i type is crucial. speaking names when someone logs in is very useful to me, it lets me know if i need to interrupt my other work for an important chat person. i haven't needed the group chat yet. file transfer did not seem to work across Yahoo but Yahoo Messenger on the mac doesn't work either so maybe it's a service issue and not Fire.

i have played with Adium but lack of spellcheck and speech would keep me away. Adium is visually more appealing but i am more interested in function.

i would like to see Fire get iTunes support, Skype support, and voice and video support, but maybe i am asking for too much!

Fire is crashing on Leopard 10.5.0 after password is entered in any account. Fire attempts to connect, a spinning beach ball follows, and then the app quits unexpectedly. This is on the PPC build of Leopard

Any chance of getting a version update? :)

Exception Type: EXC_BREAKPOINT (SIGTRAP)
Exception Codes: 0x0000000000000001, 0x000000008fe0105c
Crashed Thread: 0

I have used Adium, Yahoo IM, MSN IM, Fire, and iChat, but Fire is the best IM app for Mac! I just wish there was a version for my older macs (OS 7.1!)

Anyways, my problem.... well, every once in a while, Fire slows up my machine, and then unexpectedly quit. I'm able to reload, but it has happened many times when I have Fire and Safari running at the same time. any advice?

Also, can you enter any of Yahoo's chat rooms on a mac, or is that only on windows?

finally, there needs to be a way to read names from the address book (like iChat can) in the next version (and it should still run on 10.3 as well!)

I am using an iBook G4 with OS 10.3.9!