Mac OS X Leopard - ARCAism

NOTE The Share My Screen... and Ask to Share Remote Screen... menu items will change to
reflect the buddy you have selected, so don’t be surprised if you actually have to click Share
My Screen with Alice... or Ask to Share Bob’s Screen....
Integrating with Mail
Mail and iChat represent two different ways of communicating that are nevertheless complementary.
You might start writing an e-mail message and realize it would be better said over
iChat. Or you might want to iChat someone, but they’re not online.
For situations like these, iChat and Mail both make it easy to use the other. In iChat, selecting
Send Email... from the buddy list context menu or the Buddy menu bar item will launch Mail
with a new message to that buddy, assuming you have their e-mail address in Address Book.
If you are reading or composing mail to a buddy who is available in iChat, their name will
display a green availability dot. Mail includes Reply With iChat among the options available
from the message contextual menu, the menu bar, and an optional toolbar icon.
Advanced Status Messages
Despite their name and original purpose, iChat’s status messages have become a handy way to
announce things to your friends without having to specifically address them. Since status messages
can’t be too long, it’s often handy to just set your status to a link, which your friends can
follow if they want to know more.
In iChat, friends with URLs in their status messages will
display a small gray circle with an arrow on it, as shown in
Figure 12-12. Clicking the arrow will launch the URL in
Safari. You can also launch the URL by selecting Open URL
from the buddy list contextual menu.
NOTE If a buddy is selected, the Open URL menu item will change to reflect the name of the
URL—so in the example in Figure 12-12, the menu item would actually read “Open
http://savethelemur.org.”
Another popular use for the status message is displaying the current song you’re listening to
in iTunes. You can set this to update automatically by selecting Current iTunes Song from the
status message pop-up menu. If your buddy is taking advantage of this feature, their status message
will have the same gray circle and arrow as with a URL, except clicking it will take you to
that track in the iTunes Music Store.
NOTE You might expect the Open URL menu item to take you to a buddy’s home page,
assuming it’s listed in Address Book, but it does not. It also doesn’t work with the Current
iTunes Song feature.
Customizing iChat
CHAPTER 12 iCHAT 239
Figure 12-12. A buddy with a URL
status message in iChat
There are a lot of options packed into iChat’s Preference window. While you can certainly use
iChat without going through the preferences, you’d be missing out on a lot of functionality. Here
is a quick tour of what you can do from the various preference panels.