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Proteus is now free
Proteus, the chat client for the Mac by Defaultware, is now free! With Proteus, you can simultaneously connect to AIM, Yahoo!, MSN , ICQ, Jabber (including Gtalk), Bonjour, Gadu Gadu and Sametime chat services. Plus, it sports a customizable, Mac-like UI and plays well with Address Book.When you download the current version 4.12, you will have to go through the registration process, but there will be no charge. Defaultware has stated that a new version that does not require any sort of registration will be made available soon, as well as a universal binary.
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]
iChat for .Mac members currently down
If you go to .Mac right now and login to your account, you will discover this little notice in the sidebar about half way down: "iChat with .Mac accounts is currently unavailable. All other .Mac services are unaffected. Last Updated: 2/3/2006."Gee, thanks, Apple! How about an ETA on when this will be fixed or an explanation of why this is happening, or, Jobs forbid, a little warning that this was going to happen? I don't know about everybody else out there in Internet land, but chat is pretty mission critical to my day to day, and this is the second time in the past few months when this has happened.Time to migrate all my buddies over to the generic AIM account I registered a while back. Add "unreliable iChat performance" to the long list of cons that is going to have me seriously consider canceling my .Mac account next time it is up for renewal. Update: It's back up at 1:05pm EST with a note stating that it was down for 50 minutes (yet still with no info as to why).
The heartbreak of Apple technology
Applepeels posts about the promise and heartbreak of Apple technology, which is something that we all feel as Mac users. The promise is, of course, the fact that so much of what Apple does just works. Applepeels points to the quality of iChat's video conferencing, which is often better than much more expensive systems.The heartbreak enters the equation because the vast majority of Apple's coolest tech (with the exception of the iPod and iTunes) is Mac only. That means that most people will never use it, and that is a shame.What Apple product would you like to see ported to Windows, so that they might be able to see how good we have it (and no cheating by suggesting Tiger, though with the Intel transition that just might be possible very soon)?
Tabbed windows coming to iChat?
Aside from the multi-service support (Yahoo specifically), tabbed windows is the one thing that keeps me from abandoning Adium for iChat. Having two or more conversations going in iChat quickly eats up screen real estate, even on larger displays. According to Thinksecret, there may be hits of a tabbed iChat interface in the recently seeded developer release of Mac OS 10.4.3. Looking deep within iChat's resources, some developers have found tab images buried away. Also, suggestions that document sharing - allowing two chat participants to edit a single document simultaneously - are also lurking about, in the form of resource images and localizable.strings files.Of course, this is all rumor. The document sharing sounds cool, but I'd be happy if the only change to iChat was a tabbed interface. That's all I want, Apple!
Widget Watch: Another SMS Widget
David over at our sibling blog, DownloadSquad, really likes this SMS widget he found, because "it can send messages to Cingular, Sprint, Verizon, T-Mobile, Nextel, Virgin Mobile, Alltel, and Qwest in the USA, and they're testing T-Mobile in Germany. What's even better is the widget integrates with Address Book, and once you choose a contact (or enter a number) and choose their carrier - the widget remembers!" Now, this isn't by any means the first SMS widget, but it looks pretty cool.
