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 give each service (AIM, Yahoo, and so on) 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.
Get Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Lion Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
