The macosxhints Rating:
[Score: 9 out of 10]
- Developer: Kent Sutherland / Product Page
- Price: Donationware
One such enhancement is Chax, a donations-accepted plug-in for iChat. Installation is a simple double-click and relaunch of iChat, after which you'll find a new Chax section in iChat's preferences. Without covering everything Chax does, here are a few of the features I find especially useful:
- Change the font face and size of a user's name or status message. Unfortunately, the row height doesn't change with a smaller name font, but decreasing the size of the status font will let you see longer status messages. You still can't, however, override iChat's 45 (I think) character limit on status messages; that's all the characters you'll see of anyone's message, regardless of font size.
- Automatically reconnect after disconnection. This one's important to me, as my iChat connection drops when I connect or disconnect from the VPN at work.
- Automatically accept text chats. No more annoying windows that require a response (which I can't select without the mouse) to initiate a simple text chat.
- Hide the Smiley button on the text input line.
- Show unread message counts (or the sender's names) on iChat's dock icon. This is particularly useful with the auto-accept feature enabled.
- View chat logs within iChat. While you can't search them, as you can with Logorrhea, it's great being able to quickly open an archived chat directly within iChat. Unlike using File: Open, the log viewer groups all chats by person, so it's much easier to find a specific conversation.
These minor quibbles aside, I love this addition to iChat!

