Mac OS X Leopard - ARCAism

Figure 12-14. Tabbed chat helps you manage multiple conversations.
Saving Your Chats
Another advantage iChat has over the telephone is the ability to save your chats. If someone
gives you a to-do list, or you have a late night trans-Atlantic brainstorming session with your colleagues
in Amsterdam, you can save the chat by selecting File ➤ Save a Copy As (Cmd+S) from
the menu bar.
Alternately, if you have a really bad memory and you just want to automatically save all
chats, you can set this in the preferences.
To open a chat, just select File ➤ Open... (Cmd+O) from the menu bar and navigate to the
saved file, or, if it happened recently, find it in the File ➤ Recent Items submenu.
Smileys
One of the biggest problems with text chat is that you can’t convey emotions. The best accepted
solution to this problem was invented in 1982 by a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University
named Scott Fahlman. His simple proposal, known today as “smileys,” or “emoticons,”
are small text drawings representing facial expressions. For example, a statement meant to be
taken as tongue-in-cheek can be followed by a smiley face, rendered as =).
In iChat, text smileys are replaced with small pictures. Hence, typing =) will insert a yellow
smiley face graphic. You can also insert smileys by clicking the smiley face icon in the input field
of a chat window, or by selecting Edit ➤ Insert Smiley from the menu bar.
If you’re a traditionalist, or you frequently use iChat to discuss programming code or other
sources of nontraditional punctuation, you might find this feature annoying. Luckily, you can
turn it off by selecting View ➤ Messages ➤ Hide Smileys from the menu bar.
Alternatives to iChat
CHAPTER 12 iCHAT 243
While iChat is great, it’s not the only game in town. There are several other competing IM applications,
each with their own protocols, features, strengths, and weaknesses. Most of these have
Mac clients you can download and use, including MSN Messenger and Yahoo Messenger.