Alright so you downloaded iMessages for Mac beta and decided it was a little too beta for every day use, and now you want to use iChat again right? As you probably noticed, when you install Messages it replaces iChat, but that doesn’t mean that iChat is gone for good, and uninstalling Messages Beta is … Read More

Messages is the all new iChat replacement coming to Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, it provides for the same unlimited messaging features that iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad users have right now, but brings this right to the Mac desktop. With Messages, you can send photos, videos, attachments, contacts, locations, and more, without any … Read More

iChat Matte is a popular mod for iChat that removes the bubble aqua style text blocks and changes them to a flatter matte. The tweak works by replacing a few image files, but the official version hasn’t been updated for OS X Lion and an unofficial version floating around has the chat bubbles facing the … Read More

If you’re recording video chat or just troubleshooting problems with iChat, knowing the frame rate and other video statistics can be helpful information. From the Video menu, pull down to “Connection Doctor”, then select the “Statistics” option from the pull-down menu to see the window shown up top. The group under “Local” is your own … Read More

Few things are more annoying than reading text that is ALL IN UPPERCASE, but with the help of text transformation tools, we can instantly convert that obnoxious uppercase text into lowercase (or vice versa, if you really want to…). For the purpose of this example, we’ll use TextEdit. You can either do this with an … Read More

If you’re video chatting at night or in an area with limited lighting, you can brighten your face by opening up a blank white web browser window. This is obviously a really simple tip, but it’s kind of fun to see how surprisingly useful blank browser windows can be (like speeding up Safari on the … Read More

If you’ve ever needed to reboot in the middle of an iChat conversation you know how distracting it can be to your train of thought, plus it’s also a huge interruption to the flow of conversation. An easy solution to this is to set iChat to keep track of your last messages: Open iChat Preferences … Read More

We all have that person (or ten) on our buddy lists that insist on having their IM text formatted in stupendously obnoxious ways. Maybe it’s just using tiny font sizes, but sometimes it’s a full fledged assault on your eyes with bright pink size 26 Comic Sans font clashing against a neon yellow background in … Read More

You can instantly add a timestamp to iChat messages by hitting Command+Shift+K in any chat window. Thanks to Ryan for the tip!

Here’s a fun iChat trick I never knew about. If you type /me followed by anything, it puts your name into the iChat window followed by the text in a notification style just like the “Soandso is now online.” and “Soandso is now offline.” This only works with iChat to iChat, other IM clients will … Read More