I'll add my 2 cents here now that I've purchased and used the app for a few hours... Basically it just works as it is described to work!
I setup my MSN, Yahoo, Google Talk and MySpace accounts all relatively pain free, although I did realize I did a typo in my Yahoo account name so attempted to go straight back in and update it, which caused it to freeze for a little while but it recovered.
It seems to handle contact statuses correctly even on MSN where the other clients have all failed me plus it has a Hide Offline setting and respects all my existing contact groups (not sure if the others do that from memory) and I can manage my contacts - add/delete/block/permanently offline etc, which the other apps only have limited functionality for.
I have it set to keep me logged on for 12 hours of non use and as I am an AT&T subscriber with unlimited texts I have the email address set to XXX-XXX-XXXX@txt.att.net (don't insert the dashes just used those for illustration purposes) and that gives me 'push email' notifications if I get a message and don't have the app open quite nicely!
It does take some time to get used to the chats window and typing messages though as there is no text input box and I'm used to having to ensure the cursor is in the input box before typing, where with Beejive it will popup that translucent speech bubble when you start typing, which maximizes the screen real estate and is actually quite neat once you get used to it!
So all in all I'm impressed and considering I've paid in the vicinity of $30 for a desktop FTP client on the Mac in the past I don't think $15.99 for an IM client for various different protocols that has it's own server infrastructure in place is all that much!
I setup my MSN, Yahoo, Google Talk and MySpace accounts all relatively pain free, although I did realize I did a typo in my Yahoo account name so attempted to go straight back in and update it, which caused it to freeze for a little while but it recovered.
It seems to handle contact statuses correctly even on MSN where the other clients have all failed me plus it has a Hide Offline setting and respects all my existing contact groups (not sure if the others do that from memory) and I can manage my contacts - add/delete/block/permanently offline etc, which the other apps only have limited functionality for.
I have it set to keep me logged on for 12 hours of non use and as I am an AT&T subscriber with unlimited texts I have the email address set to XXX-XXX-XXXX@txt.att.net (don't insert the dashes just used those for illustration purposes) and that gives me 'push email' notifications if I get a message and don't have the app open quite nicely!
It does take some time to get used to the chats window and typing messages though as there is no text input box and I'm used to having to ensure the cursor is in the input box before typing, where with Beejive it will popup that translucent speech bubble when you start typing, which maximizes the screen real estate and is actually quite neat once you get used to it!
So all in all I'm impressed and considering I've paid in the vicinity of $30 for a desktop FTP client on the Mac in the past I don't think $15.99 for an IM client for various different protocols that has it's own server infrastructure in place is all that much!