If you couple this with the recent launch of Apple’s OS X Lion desktop operating system, which includes an iPad-style application launcher and full screen apps, much in the way both the iPad and Windows 8 have it’s reasonable to now ask the question, is the desktop operating system dying out?

Clearly there is a push by the two main operating system companies towards mobile computing in a big way.  The focus is on tablets and other touch devices.  In itself this isn’t such a bad thing as keyboards and mice had their death predicted many years ago, but the fact remains they are still the most effective way to get things done on a computer.  So what does Microsoft’s move mean for the desktop and is the traditional computer now a dying breed?

Well let’s look at the bigger picture for a minute.  It can safely be said that worldwide sales of desktop PCs have been sluggish in recent years as low-power devices such as smartphones and tablets have gained more power and flexibility.  However PCs and Macs are also used everywhere in business.  In fact you will find very few tablets in use in the workplace unless they are employed for very specific industrial roles.  There’s also the simple fact that on Windows 8′s dumbed down Metro interface there’s no scope for controls along the lines of those found in Adobe Photoshop or Sony Vegas Pro.

Clearly then there’s still going to be a need for a desktop operating environment for many years to come.  That is unless Microsoft, Apple and Google find new ways to build more intuitive and functional interfaces, containing more commands, into tablet-focused apps.

In itself this wouldn’t be a bad thing, as innovation in the world of software interfaces has been needed for nearly twenty years now.  For too long we’ve been stuck with a way of doing things that Xerox created in a lab in the 1970′s, it’s way past time things changed.

So is Windows 8′s Metro interface the way forward.  Probably not as it stands right now in fairness, but it will help to act as an catalyst, and so will Apple’s iOS operating system and Google’s stripped-down Chrome OS.  All three are pushing the boundaries of modern interface design and now its up to the software houses to come up with new interface designs that take advantage of these new UIs.  For now it’s just been Apple and Microsoft doing the innovating, with the major software houses including Adobe, content to carry on with the way they’ve been doing things for years.

The ribbon that Microsoft introduced with Office 2007, and that can now be found throughout Windows 8 when you drop down to the traditional desktop, is a good stab at creating an interface that’s both mouse and finger-friendly.  Whether this was by design or purely by chance we may never know, but it’s clear to see how the ribbon would translate to a Metro interface if scaled up a bit.  It would still be recognisable as the ribbon, woulds still work in the same way, and would offer a way forward for software developers to move to a new UI paradigm.

How all of this will sit with the world’s accountants, engineers, publishers, videographers and administrators remains to be seen, they probably won’t like it.  The simple fact remains though that we’ve had the WIMP (Windows, Mice and Pull-down Menus) UIs for thirty years now and the time has come to move on, whether we might like to do so or not.

The problems for OS X seem to stem from user privileges.  While Windows 7 isn’t perfect, OS X seems to have more “soft spots” according to a report by Network World.  “OS X networks are significantly more vulnerable to network privilege escalation” according to the researchers, who went on to say that “almost every OS X server service offers weak or broken authentication mechanisms.”

This news will come as a shock to some and a surprise to many.  While Apple still maintain that there is no malware threat on their desktop platform, despite the recent proliferation of the Mac Defender malware, OS X is still generally considered to be more secure than Windows 7 because of it’s Unix origins.

The fact that it’s user privileges and authentication, which is one of Unix’s strongest suits, will cause many great concern.

The researchers say that the latest version of OS X has gone some way to rectifying the problems with new sandboxing, that keeps programs isolated.

The research also looked at the vulnerability count for the two operating systems over the past few years.  In that time OS X has seen 1,151 vulnerabilities with Windows being not much higher, at 1,325.  While this is higher than the count for OS X it’s not significantly so.

On the upside, they also pointed out that Apple’s mobile operating system, iOS, is better at sandboxing applications.  It has a dynamic signing feature which the device has to approve before an application can run.  This is opposed to OS X which will accept certificates that it is given.

Whatever the outcome of this it is further proof that Apple have let their game slip in recent years by being complacent about security in their operating systems, especially OS X.  The line that it’s just secure by design is no longer true as malware these days works on the user rather than the OS itself.  It will be interesting to see how, or even if, Apple respond.

This is fantastic news for everybody and everything (except perhaps the compact disc of course).  The Apple thumb drive will cost $69 but at least means that customers will be able to buy a physical copy of the operating system.

So, as I know you’re thinking this, why if it’s more than twice the price of the OS is this such wonderful news?  We’ll we’ll ignore the price as this will come down in time and eventually we’ll find the things made or cardboard and bundled with cereal packets.  This is exactly why its so cool.  Eventually we’ll see them made of cardboard and bundled in cereal packets!

The USB pen drive has finally come of age with this news and I’m absolutely delighted that Apple have announced it.  It doesn’t matter that they won’t sell many and that it will be mostly tech enthusiasts and collectors that buy them.  What is important is that as Apple are doing this it will all of a sudden become trendy and everybody will want to do it.  This can only drive down the price of USB pen drives and greatly drive down the overall cost of storage on them.

It also means we’ll see ever more interesting form factors for the devices and pretty soon you’ll be buying software, movies and albums like this everywhere.  What’s more it’s a shot in the arm for all those retail industries to rely on having a physical item to sell.  With everything moving into the cloud it’s been looking like those without Internet access might get shut out completely.  Now Apple is helping to make certain they won’t.

So, congratulations again to Apple, I think it’s a marvelous idea and long live the pen drive.  Now, where’s that box of cornflakes..?

I’m singling Microsoft out in this article because the other major desktop operating systems don’t seem to suffer from this problem. Apple have a clear policy of only supporting older versions of OS X for so long and, because these (so far at least) haven’t been susceptible to malware in the way Windows has, there has been very little in the way of support that Apple has had to offer.

GNU/Linux, especially Ubuntu the most common name in Linux, changes so regularly that there’s no need to support older versions at all and indeed legacy support almost never happens. Each new version will run happily on the hardware of an older version so people are simply encouraged to upgrade for free.

So where does this leave Microsoft? This company has a bigger problem. Not only is it the market leader with millions more computers around the world running its operating systems, it also faces two other major problems. The first of these is big business, Microsoft’s largest customer group, who traditionally leave it at least a year or two after a new version of Windows is released to upgrade and many of whom are still using Windows XP today, despite Windows 7 having more than proven itself in terms of reliability, security and performance.

Businesses don’t like upgrading very often. They tend to approach these things in an “if it’s not broken, don’t fix it” manner because they have all types of bespoke desktop software and intranet services that still require the devil’s browser, Internet Explorer 6 to work, and it’s expensive and time-consuming to bring these up to date. In short, they’d all rather not bother.

Microsoft introduced XP Mode, a fully licenced copy of XP running in a virtual machine for Windows 7, to address this problem but it doesn’t seem to have helped. Businesses just won’t shift in great-enough numbers.

Then we have the developing market for whom computers are an expensive luxury and where running Windows 7 is just something the old 386, 486 and Pentium computers they’re still using won’t run it, at least not well. Many of these people are stuck on XP both because of performance and price. These people simply can’t afford to upgrade despite Microsoft long ago having made available a special version of Windows just for them.

The official policy of Microsoft for product support is that…

Microsoft will offer a minimum of 10 years of support for Business and Developer products. Mainstream Support for Business and Developer products will be provided for 5 years or for 2 years after the successor product (N+1) is released, whichever is longer. Microsoft will also provide Extended Support for the 5 years following Mainstream support or for 2 years after the second successor product (N+2) is released, whichever is longer.

This puts Windows XP support ending on April 8th 2014, a massive 13 years after it first went on sale and Windows Vista on April 11th 2017. Many people argue this is simply far too long.

So why is it too long and what are the reasons for forcing people to upgrade sooner? Apple seem to have the right idea on cost. It’s just too expensive to maintain support for these older operating systems. Microsoft could too save money by cutting support for XP earlier and they’d have some increased revenue for those people who are forced to upgrade (business customers on their Software Assurance programme will have already paid for Windows 7 depsite not using it).

It would be better for the man on the street too, knowing that his operating system would be more secure because he simply wouldn’t be using XP… or would it?

The question remains that if Microsoft pulled all support for XP would people actually stop using it? There would certainly be a proportion of people who would upgrade but a great many more, for whom XP is also as comfortable as an old shoe, wouldn’t even necessarily know that support had ended and would carry on using it anyway.

This scenario could create a security nightmare for the world with not only these individuals having their PCs being targeted by virus and malware writers, but also with the huge potential for these machines to be hijacked by botnets to attack larger targets.

It could also be argued that Windows versions would be much cheaper, maybe even approaching OS X levels of pricing ($90 over three years), if many years of additional support staffing didn’t have to be factored into the overall cost.

We can’t say though that we, as a consequence of this being a possibility, all have a responsibility to continue to support XP. Education is needed here for consumers, direct intervention in the form of financial help is needed for the developing world and big business needs a firm kick up the backside. It was big business who forced an extension of the support life for XP after all, and these people have a lot to answer for.

So should Microsoft drop support for a product that’s older than four years in the way Apple do? The answer in my mind is a definitive yes, but with the pressures Microsoft are under we can probably still expect to see computers running Windows XP for many years to come.

The features in question are firstly multi-touch control and gesture control, but also the iOS-style application launcher, the addition of full screen apps and their Mission Control centre for finger-friendly multitasking.

With very few exceptions in the last few years laptop manufacturers have left muti-touch out of the equation because either when using it the keyboard gets in the way, putting the screen at an uncomfortable distance, or more commonly the whole laptop topples over backwards when the screen is prodded.  Both of these are very good reasons why multi-touch has been the sole preserve of all-in-one PCs.  Even here though it has failed to take off in any meaningful way.

Now let’s for a moment set aside Apple’s magic wand of being able to take existing technologies and adapt them for the mainstream, I don’t think this is what’s happening this time around.

With Windows 8 the inclusion of proper tablet functionality is there to serve a real purpose.  That operating system will be available on tablet computers, either embedded or installable.  There are good reasons for running Windows on a tablet as well.  Where the iPad or Android tablets exist for ‘consumers’ of information, Windows is most suitable for ‘content creators’.

Thus Windows running on tablets makes a lot of sense for a lot of people.  You would assume then by the same reasoning that Mac OS X on a tablet would also make a lot of sense.  People who use Macs are also content creators, often working in the creative industries where a tablet would be of great benefit to them.

But we’ve got the iPad which isn’t a full desktop operating system and which, despite being based on the core OS X kernel, won’t run Mac desktop apps.

So what about the next generation of Apple hardware?  Certainly the next generation of iMacs will feature multi-touch, that makes sense.  It doesn’t make as much sense though to include the technology in Apple’s secondary Mac monitors or in their laptop ranges.  That is unless something new is being planned.

I say this because it stands to reason that Apple, unless they really are just trying to keep up with the Jones’ wouldn’t include so many headline features that can only be used, or used well, by a proportion of their overall customer base.  Why would they shout about these features in the way they are, making them the most prominent features of the new OS X update on their website.

This leads me to believe that new hardware could be coming from Apple with the next hardware refresh.  This could include either a tablet with a core i5 processor running the full version of OS X with the new iOS-like additions, or more probably, a laptop / tablet convertible much akin to the early Windows convertible tablets (though I would imagine coming from Apple, done properly this time).

It’s curious that this OS release seems to ask more questions than it answers, and I’m very curious what, if anything, Apple have planned for us in new hardware form factors.

In this article I will outline a few of the possibilities that can be used to replace the beloved applications often used in Mac. In some cases their may be equivalents that are nearly identical. In some cases, however, there may be equivalents that miss some features, or even offer better features. Either way, after this article, you should feel much more comfortable about migrating from OS X to Linux.

In the previous article I already mentioned using Songbird as a replacement for iTunes. Personally I prefer Songbird to iTunes. The only downfall is that Songbird can not yet communicate to either the iPhone or the iTouch. Yet. There is another tool that is currently in development that will most likely change that. But for now – you can use Songbird as a replacement for iTunes – just don’t expect Songbird to communicate with your iPhone/iTouch.

Garage Band

For those looking to compose music on your Linux machine, a good replacement for Garage Band is Jokosher. Jokosher is a simple, powerful multi-track recording studio. With this outstanding tool you can import music, record instruments, mix down, set tempos, and more. You will not, however, find a large collection of pre-recorded instruments and sounds to add and manipulate. But, if you have a Freesound account, you can import anything from their. Unlike Garage Band, Jokosher is really more a user-friendly multi-track recorder. So don’t expect to just open up the application and start piecing together music without picking up an instrument.

For more information on other audio creating software take a look at Linux-Sound.org. In my humble opinion, if you are looking for mult-media creation, your best bet is to download Ubuntu Studio which will include so man pre-installed applications for media creation/editing.

iWork

This one should be obvious. If you’re looking for an office suite to take care of all your office needs, look no further than OpenOffice. Although OpenOffice may have a different look and feel, you will find it just as easy to use AND it includes more features and applications than iWork.

iCal

If you like Apple’s stand alone calendar (that also integrates with other applications) you can install the stand alone Sunbird calendar. Sunbird was created by Mozilla so it has a very Firefox/Thunderbird feel to it. Sunbird is very close to a feature-for-feature equivalent to iCal.

iPhoto

My wife uses a Mac and she HATES iPhoto. But it is the standard for Mac photo management. For Linux there is the F-spot photo management tool. F-spot not only manages your photo collections, but will work with your digital camera as an import tool. F-spot is actually easier to use than iPhoto and will not have you fighting to try to get a piece of software to do something you KNOW it should do, but won’t.

Final thoughts

It’s not an exhaustive list, but it will help you get by with the main applications one would use on a modern Mac computer.  If you have a Mac-based application you are looking for a Linux equivalent, let me know what that is and I will attempt to locate an equivalent for you.

Of course you might be thinking “OS X is supposed to be the most user-friendly OS available, so wouldn’t migrating to Linux be even more difficults?” Not exactly. There are certain elements of OS X that inherently make the process of migrating to Linux easier than when migrating from Windows. Take, for instance, the mounting of images and drives. This task is completely obfuscated from the Windows user, but the OS X user actually knows to unmount a drive before removal. But what about simple, every day usage? How do you make that more understandable for one moving from OS X to Linux? Let’s find out.

Choose the right desktop

Figure 1

This is just as important as choosing the right distribution for the Windows user. Why? Take a look at the modern releases of the GNOME desktop. Look familiar? It should because it looks quite a bit like OS X. The primary difference between GNOME and OS X desktops is the bottom panel. With GNOME you have a secondary panel that is typically used for only win lists, trash cans, and pagers. With OS X the bottom panel is an application dock for launching application. You can, however, add the Avant Window Navigator and configure the GNOME desktop to look and feel exactly like the OS X desktop (see Figure 1).

Install Compiz

Figure 2

Many OS X users are fond of bragging about their eye-candy. But with OS X it’s not just about eye candy, because the Mac eye-candy always has a purpose. Take for instance the Expose feature. By clicking the hot key all of your open windows are made visible (in small thumbnails) on your desktop. In Compiz you can use the Scale plugin to get the same effect. By clicking <Alt><Shift>Up Arrow you will see small thumbnails of all your open windows (see Figure 2).

There are plenty of other plugins that can mimic many of the features on the OS X desktop. Having these available will make the OS X user much more comfortable on the Linux desktop.

What about iTunes?

This is one area that is a bit tricky. Because the issues with the iPhone and iTouch, you won’t find a software capable of syncing. There is a new mechanism in development (ifuze – which I will cover in a later article) that allows you access to your iPhone/iTouch. There is still no way to add music to either of these devices on Linux. Older iPods? For sure. And to that end you will want to include a particular piece of software that looks and feels very much like iTunes. That software? Songbird. I have covered Songbird in Linux in an earlier article “Songbird in Linux“.

Install the right codecs and plugins

OS X users watch a lot of videos and media files. Because of this you will want to make sure all of the proper plugins and codecs installed. You will want to make sure libquicktime is installed  as well as mplayer plugin. As well you might want to make sure flashplayer is installed and a better video viewer than the default. A good choice is the VLC player.  The last thing you want is a former Mac user who can’t view multi-media files.

Configure all default programs intelligently

When you click on a URL in your email application, you want to make sure the right browser opens. When you double click on a .odt or .doc file in your file manager you want to make sure those files are opened in the right word processor. When in OS X (and in Windows) the default action is a very predictable beast. You want to make sure this is mimicked in Linux. In GNOME you can right click a file, select Open With, and then set that as the default application for that type of file. As much as this might seem second nature, for OS X users this is simply not an issue. Having everything so well integrated is not a feature on OS X, it’s a requirement. So make sure everything works exactly as expected BEFORE the OS X user touches their Linux box.

Final thoughts

I tried not to duplicate the advice on the previous article, but do understand that much of that applies here as well. Combining these two should give you a good guidepost for migrating just about any user from one platform to Linux.

It can be somewhat cumbersome to capture a screenshot in Grab, and then have to move it into a program like Photoshop to manipulate it. And if you want to share the image, you have to change its format.

An alternative piece of software is Skitch, screen-capturing software for OS X. Skitch provides screen-capturing facilities similar to Grub, but integrates some editing tools and also provides tools to share the images.

Skitch allows users to draw on screenshots and annotate them, through placing arrows and text. One can also make images have a transparent background, crop images, add a drop shadow to them or rotate them.

One of the cooler features is the ‘drag’ feature. When a screenshot has been captured and edited, if you click ‘drag me’, you can drag the image to a folder, an email or to open in another program.

Skitch can export images as JPEGs, PNGs, PDFs, SVGs, TIFFs, GIFs and JPGs. It can also upload images to Flickr, FTP servers, WebDAV folders and skitch.com, their own image hosting service.

The software boasts many features and I find it much better to use than Grab, as there’s no need to have to use other pieces of software.

Media Transfer Protocol (MTP) is utilised on a range of devices, but especially so by Creative. Creative Zens (and their variants) utilise the protocol. Whilst the Creative NOMAD isn’t MTP, it too uses an awkward protocol not natively supported by OS X. The infamous Zune (in the eyes of an Apple fanboy) too uses MTP, however, Microsoft make it very difficult to transfer data to.

XNJB is a piece of software that provides a graphical front-end to a libnjb and libmtp: free and open source libraries that allow communication with devices like Creative NOMADs and Creative Zens. Unfortunately, neither support the Zune, due to additional restrictions Microsoft put in place. The libraries work on other POSIX operating systems, like Linux, but XNJB does not.

XNJB allows users to upload and download songs from their media players, for ID3 data to be edited and devices searched. All of this has to be done within the software; it is not integrated into iTunes or Finder.

The transfer of data felt a bit slow to me, but I expect this is primarily due to the messiness of my library and the nature of Media Transfer Protocol.

This software is, however, a useful tool when you first got the Mac. I do, though, doubt you could realistically continue to use a MTP device successfully with OS X. Naturally, you could use it inside Boot Camp or a virtual machine, but in my opinion, that too is not an ideal option.

Compatible devices are listed on their website.

EA use a product called Cider to power many of their Mac games. Cider basically adds a wrapper around the original PC game, and translates it on-the-fly to Mac. The recent release of ‘The Sims 3′, for example, works on OS X and Windows due to Cider.

Cider is likely to become more wide-spread. It saves game developers from having to develop ports, allows Mac and PC games to be released at the same time and ultimately little extra work must be put in to reach a larger market.

But Cider also allows certain Windows cracks to be implemented on Macs.

On OS X, Applications are actually just packages. If you have The Sims 3, for example, and go to the App and right click on ‘Show Package Contents’, and then choose ‘transgaming’, you will see a Windows folder structure. In there, all the files you’d expect to see are there. Basically, there’s a ‘The Sims 3.app>Contents>Resources>transgaming>c_drive>program files>Electronic Arts>The Sims 3′ folder.

The benefit of there being a hidden Windows folder structure in these apps are simple. If there’s a No-CD crack where you just have to replace a .exe, you find that .exe inside the Package and replace it. And then it works just like it does under Windows.

Whilst disk space is no longer seen as a problem, considering 1GB only costs about $0.20! However, I find it an issue on my MacBook where I only have 120GB of space and it can’t easily be expanded.

Finding hogs could be quite a task. Naturally, trawling through every directory is impractical, so automated tools must be used to find large directories and files. Software exists on most major operating systems to graphically show which folders are large and how large they are.

In 2005, gHacks reported about WinDirStat. This is freeware that shows how big directories are. WinDirStat displays everything in the C:\ (etc) drive, colour coded for the first level directory (eg Program Files or Windows), and on tiers below that it is divided as blocks. This is a easy to use visualisation. WinDirStat runs on all Windows operating systems from 95 (w/IE5) to Vista!

An OS X alternative to WinDirStat is Disk Inventory X. It is essentially identical to WinDirStat. GrandPerspective is another essentially identical option.

Linux users can choose between KDirStat or Baobab.

Another option is JDiskReport is a Java-based piece of software which analyses disk usage using pie charts. Presumably this will work on Windows, OS X and Linux.

JDarkRoom is a free alternative which uses Java, allowing it to be used under Linux, OS X and Windows. JDarkRoom even operates on eeePCs, providing a non-resource hogging word processor.

JDarkRoom is customisable. Should you dislike the Matrix-like green-on-black colour scheme, through pressing F6 you can choose any colours you want (providing you know their RGB values) and if you dislike the somewhat monotonous font, that can also be changed. Margins and font sizes can also be changed through the preference menu at F6.

JDarkRoom definitely utilises a minimalist approach to word processing, I cannot even spot an italicise option, but is nonetheless an efficient one.

I do have a few minor complaints with JDarkRoom. When saving a file, you are presented with your operating system’s default box for saving files, which breaks the minimalist GUI. I do not see why you can not just specify a path to which to save it. JDarkRoom also takes a couple of seconds to quit, which is once again an annoyance.

JDarkRoom is well worth a shot and if like me, you are prone to procrastinate and lose concentration, it may be for you. Perhaps if I used it, I would write more posts here!

Whilst KompoZer has not been updated since 2007, the major mark-up languages haven’t changed since then so it should still work. KompoZer is based on Gecko, the rendering engine which Mozilla amongst others utilise, and is a fork of Nvu (another WYSIWYG editor which is now not developed), itself a fork of Mozilla Composer!

KompoZer has all the obvious features of a WYSIWYG web editor: HTML and CSS can be edited; FTP support; tables; and tabs to navigate between pages and views. Some nicer features include an integrated W3 validator and support for XFN.

Binaries are available for Win32, PPC Macs (which will run on Intel-based ones) and Linux. Source is also available so it can be compiled for other operating systems.

Like Nvu, the application can be used from a USB pen.

I personally use KompoZer if I quickly need to whip up a webpage and I don’t have the patience to code it in Textmate. It’s certainly usable, produces relatively clean code and it’s £500 cheaper than Dreamweaver!

BOINC allows people to give a certain percentage of their computer’s resources to different causes, which the person selects. This saves these projects from having to buy a supercomputer, as small parts of what has to be processed are sent to thousands of computers which process them. This software is available for Windows, Linux and OS X.

About 25 projects utilise BOINC, ranging from projects which find prime numbers, the future of our planet’s climate, aliens (the famous SETI@Home project) and even proteins which could fight diseases like HIV.

After BOINC is installed, the user must associate themselves with the projects and create an account there. Each project with which a user registers records all of that user’s activities and places them in a league table for the amount they’ve processed. Users can associate multiple computers to an account and join groups, whose combined activities place them in a league.

BOINC allows users to choose the proportion of resources dedicated to certain projects and ensures more powerful computers get more credit than less powerful, slower ones.

Certain projects have attractive visualisations too, which depict the information being processed. SETI’s can be used as a screensaver, which shows which parts of the radio telescope’s data is being analysed.

Some problems with BOINC are its power consumption, which can deteriorate a laptop’s battery, and that it makes computers hotter and consequently noisier. The GUI is also quite confusing!

In Northern England, we have been ‘fortunate’ enough to have had quite a bit of snow this week. Not everyone is as lucky though, and Snowflakes is an application which ensures those at lower latitudes won’t miss out. Snowflakes allows snow to fall either on the desktop or, should you really need reminding, in front of all windows. The speed and number of the snowflakes can be modified. It is a little distracting even behind all windows, as the snowflakes falling can be seen in the space just above the dock.

Mac users love widgets and fairy lights. Festive Lights is a widget which allows you to ‘decorate your dashboard’. Users have several options: festive lights can surround the dashboard, or only hang from the top; they are available in different colours; mistletoe can be added; and the pattern which the flashes follow can be selected.

Fairy lights are also available for the desktop. One way would be to drag the above widget to the desktop (a little hack required). Another option is Xmas Lights, a standalone application which allows lights to appear behind and in front of windows. Several lights are available and more can be added.

Christmas Countdown is another useful widget which does what it says on the tin, displaying the amount of days until Christmas in the form of a Christmas Tree.

aMSN is an open-source intant messaging client available for Linux, OS X, FreeBSD and Windows (if you dislike the proprietary client) which supports many features specifically on the MSN network which Adium and Pidgin do not.

The client can handle most features which WLM can, excluding MSN Zone Games. aMSN is much more customisable than Windows Live Messenger too, with dozens of plugins and skins being available.

aMSN lacks the ability to connect to networks besides MSN but if you are in Adium and Pidgin and a situation arises when you may want to use a webcam, aMSN does not take long to load and it is much quicker than booting into Windows.

Update 19th October: aMSN does not yet support audio conversations