One of the nicer improvements in iChat 3.0, in my opinion, is the update to the Groups feature. In iChat 2, groups existed, but worked in a way that was far from user friendly, and not all that useful. In 3.0, though, I think they got it just about right. Groups are easy to create, they can each be turned on or off, and (most importantly), your buddies are now shown in their groups within the main Buddy List window.
However, one thing I didn't like was the color of the group divider bar -- it's a very flat gray, and (to my eye), blended right into the window frame, making it too hard to see where the group breaks were (as seen here). Thankfully, it's pretty easy to change, as the resources are simply images in the iChat application bundle. More specifically, quit iChat (if you're going to make any changes), control-click on iChat and choose Show Package Contents, then navigate to Contents -> Resources. I modified these four files:
- GroupRowBG_small.tiff
- GroupRowBG.tiff
- GroupTriangle_closed.tiff
- GroupTriangle_open.tiff
Read on for a (related) aside about the origins of this hint and my new thrice-weekly Macworld.com weblog...
I originally wrote this hint up in much greater detail for my Macworld weblog. Generally speaking, my weblog entries there are usually a "greatest hits" of macosxhints.com: I take a more detailed look at some of the popular hints from the main site, add screenshots, movies, and much more detail to the writeups. The objective is to make it such that anyone with at least a bit of Mac experience can implement the hints. This is somewhat different than the main site, where many of the hints lack the full level of detail necessary for less experienced users, due to the time it would require to do a full writeup of every hint -- consider that this hint is about 250 words on macosxhints.com, but over 1,200 words on the blog, where you'll also find a downloadable archive of my modified divider bar images.
Though the blog will usually be rewrites of existing hints, occasionally an original hint (one of my own, not a user submission) may appear on the blog first. When that happens, as in this case, I'll make sure I post back to the main site as well, so that the hints database is always up to date -- and I'll post enough detail to actually use the hint, not just a link back to the blog, though I'll include that in case someone wants the more thorough version.
If you read here regularly and are comfortable with the level of detail provided, you don't need to read the blog entries -- there will always be more hints on the main site, and it will always be updated daily. The Macworld blog is simply a place where I can go into more detail on certain hints, targeted at a broader selection of users. Feel free to stop by if you wish, of course!

