Mac OS X Lion: The Missing Manual

The Buddy List

Once you’ve entered your account information, you’re technically ready to start chatting. All you need now is a chatting companion, or, in instant-messaging circles, a buddy. iChat comes complete with a newly unified iChat Buddies window where you can house the chat “addresses” for all your chat partners from all the different chat services, in a single list.

Tip

If you like, you can restore iChat to the pre-Lion way of doing things, where each service (AIM, Yahoo, and so on) had its own separate buddy list window. To do that, choose iChat→Preferences→General; turn off “Show all my accounts in one list.” Now you can use the Window menu to reveal each service’s buddy list separately.

A tiny icon appears next to each name in your list, indicating that person’s availability to chat—and what kinds of multimedia chats are available. A phone icon means “equipped for an audio chat”; a camcorder means “equipped for a video chat.” The little colored dots mean “available” (green), “away” (red), “idle” (orange), and “undetermined—probably on a cellphone” (gray). A little icon means you’re chatting with someone on a cellphone.