Tài liệu Chapter 21. iChat doc

Chapter 21. iChat

Somewhere between email and the telephone lies a unique communication tool

calledinstant messaging. Plenty of instant messenger programs run on the Mac, but guess

what? You don't really need any of them. Mac OS X comes with its very own instant

messenger program called iChat, built right into the system and ready to connect to your

friends on the AIM, Jabber, or Google Talk networks.

To start up iChat, go to Applications iChat, or just click iChat's Dock icon. It looks

like a blue speech balloon with a camcorder inside, which is a clue to one of iChat's best

and most substantially beefed-up Leopard features: live video chats over the Internet.

This chapter covers how to use iChat to communicate by video, audio, and text with your

online pals.

21.1. Welcome to iChat

iChat does five things very well:

• Instant messaging. If you don't know what instant messaging is, there's a teenager

near you who does.

It's like live email. You type messages in a chat window, in real time, and your

friends type replies back to you. Instant messaging combines the privacy of email

and the immediacy of the phone.

In this regard, iChat is a lot like AOL's popular Instant Messenger (AIM) and

Buddy Chats. In fact, iChat lets you type back and forth with any of AIM's 150

million members, which is a huge advantage. (It speaks the same "chat" language

as AIM.) But iChat's visual design is pure Apple.

• Free long distance. If your Mac has a microphone, and so does your buddy, the

two of you can also chatout loud, using the Internet as a free long-distance phone.

Wait, not just the two of you—the10 of you, thanks to iChat's party-line feature.

• Free videoconferencing. iChat's old name was iChat AV, where AV stood for

audio-video. In Leopard, the program is just called iChat, but its multimedia

heritage remains. If you and your buddies each have broadband Internet

connections and a camera—like the one built into many Mac models or even a

digital camcorder—up to four participants can join in video chats, all onscreen at

once, no matter where they happen to be in the world. This arrangement is a jaw￾dropping visual stunt that can bring distant collaborators face-to-face without