iChat 3 Pictures

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03 Messages Preferences

Oct 2008

3 Messages Preferences

This is the iChat 3 Messages Section of the Preferences.

Somewhat self explanatory. You choose your Bubble colour, the Font (style) and the Font colour. As a general Rule go for Light on Dark or Dark on Light. As far as Fonts go, they will only display if your Buddy has the same font (it will default to Helvetica in iChat if they don't have it. Choose something that is easy to read. Also choose a suitable size for most of your Buddies.

You can choose to override the incoming format but this is global and will do it for all Buddies in all the chat variants. It can become confusing in Group chats and Chatrooms if everyone has the same Bubbles and Font, particularly if you also choose to NOT display the icons/Buddy Pics either.

Using the Confirm before Sending option does provide an extra pop up window to check the name of the file before sending. The downside is that it is another click to go through.

Automatically Saving Chat Transcripts can be very useful. Any and all text chats for 1-1 chats to group chats are then saved to a folder called "iChats" inside your Documents Folder. These are saved by name with a date and time part to the file name. iChat can reopen them from the File menu or you can Double Click the file itself and iChat will open it. You can also use Open With from the Finder's File menu and use a Text or Word Processor application but they are then difficult to read as all the info to create the bubbles, colours and fonts are in there for each IM sent.

The next Pane across the top of the Preferences is Alerts.

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Created with JAlbum 4.0.6

Created October, 2008 Major Update/Edit October 2024.

 ©  Ralph Johns. Created October 2008

Information Block

This site is about iChat from Version 1 through to iChat 5.x.x
Mostly this is kept as an Historical Document. Some small tense changes have been made but the content is by and large untouched.

It has a mixture of basic info and problem solving help.

The sections below will change for Specifics about info on the page on view

About This Page

These effectively are global settings to how your Bubbles and the text in them look.

You can override incoming IMs to look how you want although there can be drawbacks to this in Group Chats as everyone's messages will look the same.

Compatibility

As mentioned above this has had a major Edit/Update in September 2024 moving towards being fully HTML 5 compliant meaning that the Browsers listed below are likely to no longer work.

I have tested in Safari 18.1, Firefox 130.x and 131.0, Vivaldi 6.9.3447.48 and iCab 6.2.3 (All Mac Browsers) I don't have access to a PC let alone multiple browsers to test on.

The original pages worked with Win/IE 5.5 and later (should work in 5.0, but not confirmed), Firefox 2, Safari 3, Opera 9, iCab 3.02 and later, Mac/IE 5, Netscape 6 and later

Old browsers (IE version 4 or earlier, Netscape 4 or earlier) should/may only see a text-based page which, while not the prettiest option, is still entirely usable.

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