Very nice.

It looks great. However, it look slike it needs a little polish. Like its one step from being done.

any suggestions for what the "little polish" might comprise of?

This looks very nice, and I hope to fill in the blank for Badnewsblair. The history IMs part looks terrific and, in my opinion, needs no changes. The stroke, however, on current messages is too dark. I don't like the black showing up so greatly when comparing it to the rest of the message view. Can this stroke be changed to either a light-gray color or something like that? One last thought is to have all the times, IMs and status changes, to be lined up with one another. I think if those changes are done (at least the first suggestion) this message view is definitely 5-rating material. Good work Maxwell.

I agree with quincy and will add two suggestions of my own. I'd also make the text on the left line up. I'd also smooth the corner curves, as they look kinda pixelated.

I really like the soft fuzzy look of the history. I'll have to try to do something using that effect.

I also just noticed that it doesn't play well with custom backgrounds and it also borks if I send only a space.

Thanks to everyone for the comments! Version 1.1 should be ready in a day or two and will address these issues as well as a few I've picked up on myself.
When you say you'd like the text on the left line up, do you mean you don't like the indenting of wrapped lines?
The space-only message problem is a difficult one, having to do with white-space collapsing in xml. So far I haven't found a way to fix it, and it looks like noone else has either (Fiat has _major_ problems with this). I might end up resorting to a javascript hack to replace empty nodes with a non-breaking space..
As for custom backgrounds, I never intended for the theme to work with anything except the default grey background. Making it work with custom images would require some fairly significant reworking. However, if enough people are interested in this feature, I'll try to get it in for v.1.2

So when do I get royalties for being a test subject?

well, i think I've managed to fix everything mentioned thus far. I chose to lighten only the outgoing messages' borders, since I thought the extra emphasis of the solid black was good on the incoming. Hope you all agree with my decision :) Also, I managed to set up an easy fix for the white-space posting problem. Just stuck a fixed-height (1em) inline-div inside of the message post, and gave it a negative right margin so that it didn't effect the flow. Don't know why I didn't think of that right away. Enjoy the new version, and keep your comments coming!

Another way (perhaps cleaner) to fix the space bug would be to replace any occurrence of '%message%' with '%message '. Any why the date_separator isn't flush-right like the other status messages?

replacing "%message%" with "%message% " wouldn't work. The included space would collapse just like the one that was sent.
I did right-justify the date-separator because I thought of it more as a heading than a status message..

er.. *didn't

D'Oh! Sorry, I didn't read the comment after I left it. I was suggesting placing a non-breaking space after %message%.

Give me little user icons and this will be the greatest message style to ever roam the Earth.

(preferably alternating)

I like it, but if you go into group chat you really need those buddy names. ;) Any chance to add that bakc in?

wooo.. haven't been back here in a while - sorry to all those who didn't get a reply to their comments!
As I don't often (read: never) get into group chats, the missing names hasn't been an issue for me, and thus I haven't put the effort into fixing it :) The thought has been kicking around in the back of my head though.. I was thinking on making the different people's bubbles vary in colour. So far as I know however, there is no way in the beginning of a chat to tell who is in it, so this would have to rely on some pretty gross ecmascript (== much work for me).
As for user icons - they never were, and likely never will be included. Where would they fit?
Regarding the use of a non-breaking space to prevent wierdness - I tried this first, but decided my method was better. Using a non-breaking space sometimes resulted in wierd wrapping behavoir.

I really, really love this theme, but one minor annoyance is that the popup sender/service/time descriptor thing likes to pop up no matter where my pointer is so long as Adium has focus. Again, it's not really so much of a problem as it is an annoyance and I don't even know if that's something you can fix, but I thought I'd throw it out there

I like it ^^

Okay, this is pretty old and so unlikely to get updated, but I have to say the drop shadow on message text really annoys me. It makes reading the messages very hard on the eyes. The blur on message history is nice, but the reduced readability on the current messages is a dealbreaker for me.