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iChat for Mac - Instant Messenger and Add-ons

What is iChat?

Included with Mac OS X, iChat is a powerful instant text messaging application (IM), iChat comes with Mac OS X and is loaded with great features that make sending messages to your AIM or MobileMe buddies fast and easy including audio, video and screen-sharing capabilities as well as text messaging.

iChat can serve as a client for AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), MobileMe, ICQ and XMPP. It uses a XMPP-like protocol and Bonjour for user discovery

iChat text chats feel like natural conversations, with icons and thought bubbles that make it easy to see who’s saying what. With iChat, green (available), yellow (idle), and red (away) dots can be seen next to the name of each connected user on the buddy list. To cater for color-blind users, this can be altered to show different shapes to illustrate status rather than color.

iChat Add-ons

There are several third-party add-ons that extend the functionality of iChat.

Chax

Chax adds tabbed windows and auto-accept of messages and file transfers. Chax also prevents iChat from pausing audio-video (AV) chat while simultaneously transferring files. The ability to animate buddy icons, which was absent in versions of iChat before Mac OS X Leopard, can also be added through Chax. It also can remove the html tags that are normally visible to the ICQ correspondents of iChat. It was developed by Kent Sutherland and is similar in functionality to AIM+ and DeadAIM, which added similar features to the Windows version of AOL's AIM client.

iUSBCam

Although a FireWire video camera, such as Apple's iSight, is among Apple's requirements for iChat AV video conferencing, iUSBCam works around the iChat's limitations before Mac OS X 10.4.9 by enabling the use of USB cameras. It also provides basic picture adjustment and the ability to broadcast and automatically save the contents of the screen.

ShowMacster

ShowMacster lets the user stream photos, video, and sound files in their video chat as well as a live view of their screen. ShowMacster also allows "writing" of simple markup onto streamed images—adding circles, lines, and the like in a set of primary colors and widths. Using a live view of a section of the screen together with this markup capability, a user can do limited whiteboarding, albeit in one direction only. If two (or more) iChat users each use ShowMacster they can communicate their ideas back and forth, but this is not true whiteboarding; the markup is streamed in video only, so there is no shared document which the users both (all) modify, nor is there a way to save the markup.

zfone

zfone provides high-grade encryption for audio and video chat via iChat and other software. While software applications such as Skype do provide encryption, their encryption algorithms are not open source or audited. Therefore zfone and iChat may provide a higher degree of security compared to other methods of audio and video conferencing.

ChatFX

ChatFX adds special video effects created by the Quartz Composer application included in Apple's free Developer Tools. ChatFX changes the video in a video conference through use of Quartz Composer compositions. Special video effects like bluescreen, distort, display of desktop, sobel, comicbook, ghost, etc. come with ChatFX but an unlimited number of effects are possible by creating new compositions in Quartz Composer. Apple Inc. has implemented the functionalities of ChatFX in the version of iChat included with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.

iGlasses

iGlasses gives the user control over the brightness, contrast, and color of the streamed video image. It is especially useful for sub-optimal lighting situations where the iChat user appears too dark, for example. It also provides mirroring and image rotation - useful when an iSight camera is mounted upside down. The "night vision" mode reveals the iSight's high sensitivity, allowing viewing of a darkened room, and making rudimentary security monitoring easier.

NOTE: ichat Inc (sometimes written iChat Inc) was a company that created instant messaging software and associated technology for embedding chat rooms in web pages. The company was founded by Andrew Busey. ichat was also the name of their initial product. Claims that Apple's iChat client was based on the company's technology appear unfounded.