Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Yosemite Edition

Video Chats

The state of the art in video calling, of course, is FaceTime (DVD Player).

But FaceTime requires that both you and your partner be on Apple computers. Messages, on the other hand, lets you conduct free video chats with up to four people who aren’t on Macs. They show up on three vertical panes, gorgeously reflected on a shiny, black table surface. If you’ve got the Mac muscle and bandwidth, your partners are as crisp, clear, bright, and smooth as television—and as big as your screen, if you like.

UP TO SPEED: The Chat Transcript

When you close a chat by clicking the in its tab, the conversation is gone forever.

Unless, that is, you’ve opened Messages→Preferences→General and turned on “Save history when chats are closed.”

In that case, Messages autosaves the text of your conversations. Even if you close one, you can retrieve its contents by starting another chat with the same person; the history reappears.

Behind the scenes, your transcripts are saved in your Library→Messages→Archives folder. (To get to your Library folder, press Option as you choose Go→Library in the Finder.)

If you do have “Save history” turned on, and you wind up having a particularly incriminating chat, you can tell Messages not to save its transcript by pressing ⌘-Delete. Messages asks if you’re sure. If so, that prose is hosed.

People can come and go; as they enter and leave the “videosphere,” Messages slides ...