Chapter 21. iChat
Somewhere between email and the telephone lies a unique communication tool called instant messaging. Plenty of instant messenger programs run on the Mac, but guess what? You don’t really need any of them. Mac OS X comes with its very own instant messenger program called iChat, built right into the system and ready to connect to your friends on the AIM, Jabber, or GoogleTalk networks.
In Snow Leopard, iChat was the focus of a lot of refinement and polish. Video conversations now require much lower bandwidth, meaning that slower Internet connections may now be eligible to try out video chats. The window for iChat Theater (when you show a movie or slideshow presentation to someone on the other end) can now be four times as big as before (640 x 480 pixels, for example). And so on.
To start up iChat, go to Applications→iChat, or just click iChat’s Dock icon. This chapter covers how to use iChat to communicate by video, audio, and text with your online pals.
Welcome to iChat
iChat does five things very well:
Instant messaging. If you don’t know what instant messaging is, there’s a teenager near you who does.
It’s like live email. You type messages in a chat window, and your friends type replies back to you in real time. Instant messaging combines the privacy of email and the immediacy of the phone.
In this regard, iChat is a lot like the popular AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) and Buddy Chats. In fact, iChat lets you type back and forth with any of AIM’s 150 million members, which ...
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