Synapse IM, a better looking messenger

Synapse is an instant messaging client available for Linux. It is relatively new and is in its alpha stage. It provides a lot of new and exciting features like drag and drop photo sharing, web previews, grid view and a lot more. Synapse is far better looking than any of the IM clients I have ever used in Linux. This article is a small review of Synapse.

I have used a lot of IM clients in Linux and Synapse provides a richer user experience and more beautiful interface than most of them. Linux has mostly lagged in the area of better looking UIs (user interfaces). Synapse is a step forward to provide both functionality and polished UIs in Linux applications.
                                                  

Following are the Pros and cons associated with Synapse.

Pros

Some of the great features provided by Synapse are:

• Grid View - You can view all your friends in a compact view (looks like small thumbnails).
• Activity Feed - This feature tells you about your friends' activities like changing IM status etc.
• Photo sharing - Just drag and drop the pic into the chat window to share it with your friend. Synapse also supports flickr integration.
• Web preview -This generates a web preview of the webpage for popular websites.
• Code sharing - This feature lets you share syntax highlighted code with other developers.
• Highly extensible - Plugins can be developed and added to provide extra functionalities.
• Customizable - The message window has a lot of inbuilt customizations available.

Cons

• No Multi Protocol support - Sn only supports XMPP protocol (used by gtalk, jabber etc).
• Buggy - Its an alpha release so is a bit buggy.
• No Updates - The alpha version was released on 15th march 09 since then no updates have been done. The website has no information about it.

I have no idea whether the project is still going on or not but FOSS projects like these should get some contribution. The website says that the project team has only one member (the actual developer) Eric Butler. May be the developer is busy somewhere else and so has been unable to give time to this project. But the least we can contribute to such FOSS projects is by spreading the message about them. A small community of thankful users is enough to keep such projects alive.

If you people know about any of such FOSS projects which are relatively new but not popular then please leave a comment mentioning them. I would love to write about them.