There’s been a lot of debate on the net about the best client. Pidgin vs Trillian used to be of main concern until Digsby emerged. In its initial release stages it was near, or as good as any of the two, but since then it has developed and it is rapidly leaving every other chat client in the dust.

Why? Apart from the obvious features, the ability to connect to any IM network, it has tons of extra features, and it seems the Digsby team is developing more and more. For me Digsby stands out for four reasons. Awesome Twitter support, great email support, connectivity stability and skins. Plus, it has the cutest logo ever! Turn the page and I’ll introduce you to Digsby, since this is a post in the in-depth column, prepare yourself for a longer read!

Features you’ll love in Digsby

Instant messaging quality

All the big apps do reasonably well here, but as a Pidgin convert I can tell you that Pidgin is not always great with IM networks. Many times I got disconnected, and if I added a buddy from Meebo for example, there were some problems like lost contacts and so on. Digsby does an awesome job of connecting me to my friends, I never disconnect and I haven’t seen any friend adding problems. Also at initial startup I connect to 3 IM networks, one email and two Twitter accounts and all this is done in less than 5 seconds.

Twitter

Nowadays I do a fair bit more Twittering than I used to, and I have more than one account. Since digsby can handle Twitter accounts, it is a great place to both add updates and read them. This means I can be much more productive, since I don’t have to log on and off from the Twitter site, and I don’t need to use multiple applications.

Email

Also somewhat of a Standard feature, but done extremely well in Digsby. Multiple accounts are supported, some of the bigger comanies like Gmail and Yahoo only require your username, but POP and IMAP is also available. You can view message previews, go to your inbox, go to the compose page straight away, again great for speedy working.

Skins

Digsby has a great skinning system because it allows you to change the skin of the application and the skin of the chat window separately. Apart from allowing some variation it is perfect for me, since it allows me to blend the app into my Windows environment, while still enabling some changes inside the app just for fun. The built in ones are great too, I actually haven’t even used other skins.

Layout

Digsby for now has three types of accounts you can add. Instant messaging accounts, Email and Twitter accounts. You can choose to show these in the contact list, which means you will really have a one stop place for everything because those extra acccounts will sit at the bottom of your Digsby window, just right click to Twit for example. You can also choose to show these in the system tray, you won’t even have to go to the Digsby window in that case, that’s what i call flexibility.

Of course you have all the options other apps offer like sorting contacts, showing only online contacts, removing them, re-ordering them and so on.

Options

You’ll get your fair share of options here, from contact layouts to privacy options there is al ot to play around with to customize the app. Contact layout is a great feature, you can change the way all your buddies are shown. Again, attentiveness to detail can be seen, once you click on a different layout the changes are reflected immediately. You can do some advanced layouts, with some work you can get it exactly the way you want it.

You can enter your own status messages, you can disable “typing” notifications, you can manually edit your allow and block list, you can adjust settings so people can not add you to their IM list, and so on and so on and so on.

Verdict

Overall, I didn’t actually do much to show how Digsby works, because in the end it’s an IM client. Click, type, send. The features, the smoothness of how it works and the cool options you get make it stand out of the crowd and for me, it easily beats Trillian and Pidgin without even trying. The initial release of Digsby was quite slow, but they seem to have corrected this problem and now I have no issues.

If you need a solid IM client which won’t let you down, try Digsby, it really is worth it.