Mac OS X Power Hound, Second Edition

iChat

iChat is Apple’s souped-up version of AIM, America Online’s Instant Messenger program. With iChat, you can carry on typed conversations with other people, share pictures and documents with a quick drag-and-drop, and have video and audio chats with Mac and PC fans alike—assuming you and your buddies have high-speed Internet connections and video cameras.

If you’ve signed up for Apple’s $100-per-year Mac.com service, you already have an iChat user name: it’s your .Mac email address. If you don’t use .Mac, you can still use iChat by signing up for a free AIM screen name. You don’t need to be a member of AOL to receive an AIM name, either. Just visit http://www.aol.com/community/directory.html and follow the link that says, “Try AOL Instant Messenger now for FREE.”

Prevent Premature Chat Closure

In today’s multitasking world, it’s never enough to simply do one thing at a time. So, in addition to talking to your 27 online iChat buddies, you’re also browsing the Web, working on your doctoral thesis in Word, and creating your latest Photoshop masterpiece. In the midst of all the

-tabbing and window dragging, you hit

-W, thinking you were closing the thesis, as you’re done editing for the day. Instead, much to your dismay, one of your 27 chat windows vanishes. Although iChat issues a warning ...