Managing your bigger-than-ever buddy list is easier in iChat 6.0. The app now supports a unified status; you set your status once, and it updates all the services you're using. And if you press Command-F, or choose Edit -> Find, you can filter your buddy list by typing all or part of the name of the person you're looking to chat with.

iChat now makes it easier to add a photo to your IM buddies: You can choose from your iPhoto faces. If you frequently chat with lots of separate folks simultaneously, you'll appreciate that iChat 6.0 also lets you drag chat tabs out of the main window into windows of their own, and merge chats together by dragging them onto each other. Those are nice new features for iChat to introduce.

Some interactions that iChat still clings to, however, are head-scratchingly odd. I refer, of course, to the "Accept" paradigm: Whenever you receive an IM to start a conversation--that is, an IM from someone with whom you aren't currently engaged in an active chat window--iChat pops up a new window, asking you to approve or reject the initiated conversation. It's annoying, and iChat's employed this bizarre behavior for as long as I can remember. I can't use iChat at all unless I take advantage of .

There's one other area where iChat pales in comparison to Adium. The biggest benefit Adium adds to my daily workflow is that I can keep tabs on my incoming messages without incessantly switching back to the app. Thanks to its Dock notifications (which can include the name of the person sending you IMs) and integration (which can display the text of incoming messages in floating palettes atop your screen), Adium lets you know who's saying what without interrupting your work. iChat still relies on a mostly useless Dock icon bounce, with no other information provided about incoming messages unless you navigate back to iChat's window. That approach simply doesn't mesh with my approach to multitasking. Less annoying, but still odd: When you type messages in iChat, Lion's iOS-style autocorrection feature doesn't seem to work.