Spice up iChat with Chax

Chax is one of those addons that makes you go "ahhh, at least someone's listening." This is a powerful, feature-packed and altogther necessary preferences plugin for iChat. The developer's site offers a lengthy list of features this fantastic plugin brings to the table, but for now, here's a short rundown to get your mouses clicking:

• Save and restore window positions for individual screen names (To Kent Sutherland, the developer: I cannot thank you enough for this. The fact that iChat doesn't already do this is just plain silly.)

• Display Address Book nicknames instead of full names

• Option to auto-accept text chats, skipping new message notification window

• Option to open images sent through direct connect directly in Preview (thank you!!)

• Unread message notification in the dock

• Change the delay of or disable auto-away (thank you!!)

• New message windows cascade properly instead of always appearing on top of each other

• Built-in log viewer

There are over 25 features that Chax enables, all wrapped up in its own clean, easy to use preference pane that is simply added to iChat's preferences. Kent also offers a list of upcoming features on his site, but I'd like to echo one of his requests: please don't ask him for tabbed chatting. Developers like him are (usually) under enough pressure as it is, which brings me to a request of my own: this plugin is free, but please consider donating if you wind up appreciating it even half as much as I do. Great stuff like this really deserves some love, and PayPal for some reason doesn't do hugs yet.

[via MacOSXHints]