There's a terribly messy line I recall from a movie preview, in which Drew Barrymore vents to her friend the frustrations of communicating with a potential date. "I had this guy leave me a voice mail at work, so I called him at home, and then he e-mailed me to my BlackBerry, and so I texted to his cell, and now you just have to go around checking all these different portals just to get rejected by seven different technologies," her character says. (Or something like that. It's from "He's Just Not that Into You," if you hadn't guessed.) Beyond the thick, gloopy cheese of the line is a bony kernel of truth: the greater our flexibility to communicate through voice and text on multiple devices, the greater the demands to manage these separate portals.
With instant messengers, at least, the solution is clear cut: multinetwork chat clients, which gather your IM accounts into a single program window, letting you contact friends on Yahoo, AOL, Google, ICQ, and Windows Live Messenger IM networks (and often even more). We've taken a fresh look at six multinetwork IM apps. Some, like Trillian Astra, Digsby, and VoxOx--all beta programs--integrate Web mail notifications and social-networking features alongside their considerable visual attentions. The plainer-looking Pidgin and Miranda messengers are the kindest to your PC's resources, and the best choices for those uninterested in being bogged down by more than the chat basics. Palringo, in the meantime, is known for its omnipresence on desktop and smartphone platforms, including BlackBerry, iPhone, Symbian, and Windows Mobile phones. If your contacts are dispersed between two or more of these networks, you can't go wrong switching to an all-in-one chat app.
In updates news, one of our favorite analogs to Microsoft Office, OpenOffice.org, has received a few tweaks that notably improve the way it handles images, in addition to enhancements in the word process and spreadsheets applications. Google's speedy Chrome browser also received some attention after a developer's version was released that brings the browser alternative closer to accepting the kinds of add-ons responsible for Firefox's fame.
On a final housekeeping note, you may have noticed that the face of our Windows newsletter has changed. We'll continue to adjust its look in the upcoming weeks until we're happy with it, and hopefully you will be, too. We're listening, so let us know what you think we're doing right and wrong with the newsletter's layout. Click the 'Read More' link at the bottom of this story, then leave a comment. You'll need to be logged-in to comment. If you're not registered with CNET, going through the comments process will prompt you to sign up for a free account.
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