My conclusion was that although Digsby is a fantastic messaging client with good design and features, the 70mb+ RAM usage became just too much to put up with.

Only a few days ago however I was excited to see that the Digsby team has released a new alpha build for testing purposes. Apparently the developers have spent the last few months completely rewriting the underlying architecture of Digsby in order to bring RAM usage down to an acceptable level.

“We completely reworked the architecture to use less memory and also improved the memory management by releasing objects when they are no longer needed.  We also hunted down and eliminated numerous memory leaks.  All in all, these changes lower Digsby’s RAM usage by over 50%. It should now hover in the 20MB – 50MB range depending on how many accounts you have and what you are doing at the moment.”

That’s not all, the Digsby blog post also describes these other changes:

Performance:
User interface should be performing between 2 and 4 times faster then before. That includes things such as menu re-drawing and buttons etc. Promise for future builds to focus on GUI response time, CPU utilization and the like.

Firewalls and Proxy Servers:
IM timeouts where another annoying issue with previous Digsby builds and this one has introduced multiple automatic attempts at connecting through various ports.

Crash Reporter:
This is still a product under development and bug-catching is crucial, this build introduces a ‘crash reporter’ for helping the team locate all the rare and tricky bugs. “The major changes in architecture in this build may introduce a couple of new crash causing bugs and that is one of the reasons why we want to test the build before releasing it to everyone.”

Bug Fixes + Enhancements:
Numerous bug fixes and various enhancements, the full list will be provided with the public release.

I got between 15 (idle) – 50mb with MSN, 2 Hotmail accounts, Gtalk, Facebook + Chat, MySpace and Twitter all running. Some people are reporting Digsby running at as low as 10-15mb, although I have no idea how many accounts they use.

Such was my dedication that I sat here for 4 hours downloading this new build over my crippled Internet connection at around 3kbs and enduring two time-outs halfway through.

It was worth it though, check it out!

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Given the growing number of social networks, chat addresses and email accounts I had I found it a brilliant solution to keeping it all under check. I also liked the simple but effective design and of course there was that warm early adopter glow of being there to support a growing service from the very beginning.

6 months later and I started to use Pidgin.

This wasn’t a deliberate choice at first, I started dual booting Ubuntu and of course Pidgin is the default chat client. I was immediately impressed by what I saw, it was fast, a lot faster then Digsby and supported a whole lot more chat networks while additionally having some great plugins available.

While Digsby is great in the way it keeps track of social networks like MySpace, Facebook and Twitter the reality is I wasn’t actually using those features very much at all. When I did use them it was through Flock. It did have the very real advantage of Facebook Chat integration which I did use a lot, however I quickly discovered that Pidgin also had a plugin available to achieve this.

Also I found Pidgin had support for IRC Chat which is something I have begun to use a  fair bit lately.

The fact was I was using Digsby, a IM client which was way too resources heavy and susceptible to RAM spikes when Pidgin would do the job better.

I felt a little guilty, but I’m not writing Digsby off at all. I still think it’s great and I really like the direction it’s going in, but I just found a better alternative for my needs at this point in time. Digsby is still a very young client and has a lot of potential. A promised update is coming up to address lots of performance issues and hopefully introduce some new features and I’m looking forward to that.

For now however Pidgin is my stop-gap.

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The Pidgin Encryption plugin adds encryption to Pidgin by generating a public and private key during activation. Let me give you a short rundown on that encryption scheme. The public keys are accessible by all of your contacts which can use them to encrypt their messages. The only person who can decrypt those messages is the one with the private key that builds a pair with that public key. It comes down to swapping the public keys so that messages can be encrypted and decrypted on the fly.

Thankfully Pidgin does most of that automatically. There is no need, like in other applications, to transfer the public key on a different way to the other users. The keys are automatically created and the public key is automatically transferred to all contacts. There is however the possibility to exchange the keys using different way to increase the security. Meet your friend at a secret location and hand him the self destructing disk with your public key..

You obviously need Pidgin for that and the Pidgin Encryption Plugin. You can regenerate your key in the preferences and change the default size of 1024 bits to a value between 512 and 4096 bits. Make sure that both “Automatically Encrypt” boxes are checked. A list of the public keys of your buddies is also available in the preferences.

By default the conversations take place unencrypted. A user needs to press the TX button to encrypt the messages. If the user on the other end is not using the plugin he will see a notification that the message is encrypted and that he needs the plugin. If that is the case the TX button will show to be secure while the RX button will be plain. (I guess TX stands for Transmit while RX for Receive)

To always use encryption when chatting with a specific user you need to right-click that user and select Turn Auto-Encrypt On. To avoid man in the middle attacks you need to compare keys with your buddy. This can be done in the Pidgin preferences. I suggest another way of communication to compare the keys. (phone, irc, voip)

A last tip. If you use multiple computers you probably want to make sure that all use the same keys. You can do that by moving the keys from .pidgin directory in *nix or in the application data directory in Windows to the new computer. The keys are stored in the three files:

• id.priv (private keys)
• id (public keys)
• known_keys

Each line of the files represents one key which means that you can also copy only selected keys to the other machine.

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The only real problem that most users could face is that every participants needs to run the plugin to be able to encrypt the chat. Windows users simply download and install the plugin. The last step would be to activate it in Tools > Plugins. This generates the RSA keys that are used to encrypt and decrypt the messages.

A click on the key icon and the selection of Enable Encryption starts an encrypted session. The public key of your contact will automatically be downloaded to your computer and will be used to encrypt your messages to him and vice versa.

Features:

• Automatically creates a public/private key pair for you upon loading the plugin
• Automatically transmits your public key to other users.
• Supports 512 – 4096 bit keys.
• Saves keys of known users, and warns you if their public key has changed.
• Embeds all encryption and keys inside HTML, so if the other user doesn’t have the plugin, they will get a little message telling them about the plugin, and won’t get a screen full of garbage.
• Stores keys in human readable files in your .gaim/.pidgin directory, in case you ever need to copy/edit them by hand. Which you really shouldn’t have to do.
• Automatically recognizes if you are chatting with someone who has the plugin- see the Preferences dialog.
• Available for the Windows version of Pidgin.
• Modular and extensible. If you want to define a different type of encryption, you can use this plugin as a wrapper to take care of transporting the encrypted binary over the IM pipe.

Read More:

Pidgin Encryption

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