MacBook® Portable Genius, 2nd Edition

Chapter 8. How Can I Communicate with iChat?

There's something extremely compelling about having a high-quality video chat with someone who is far away; did I mention that it's free if you have a MobileMe account? Of course, you can also use iChat for text (you can use an AIM, Jabber, or Google Talk account for text chatting with iChat) and audio chats. Among its many useful features is that iChat allows users to share their desktops, which is great for helping someone, being helped yourself, or collaborating.

Configuring iChat

Working with Buddies

Chatting with Text

Chatting with Audio

Chatting with Video

Sharing Desktops During a Chat

Sharing a Document During a Chat

Chatting On

Configuring iChat

Before you start chatting, you need to do some basic configuration to prepare iChat, the most important of which is configuring the accounts you're going to use to chat. There are two basic paths to this end. One is when you first start iChat and the Assistant walks you through the account setup steps. The other is manual configuration, which you can use to set up accounts at any time. You'll want to use various iChat Preferences to tweak iChat to make it work as well as possible for you.

Creating and configuring accounts

To be able to chat, you need to configure iChat with at least one chat account. To get started, launch iChat and use the following steps to configure it through the Assistant, which ...