On Apple’s 300+ Leopard Features List, iChat earns the recognition of having the most new features in the list–24 to be exact. Although iChat 4 includes a nice series of new features for the AV crowd and some other new ideas, is the new iChat any better at just plain, old-fashioned text chatting? I spent a couple of weeks with iChat to find out.

These days, the two biggest names in chat applications for the Mac are iChat and Adium. I’ve been using Adium for the past few months, partly because of its ability to sign onto multiple IM clients at once, from one application, but also because it contained many more advanced chatting features that iChat didn’t have, unless you installed the free Chax plugin for iChat. (Adium, however, does not currently have any of the AV capability that iChat has, and iChat does a better job with file transfers.)

iChat still only supports AIM, .Mac (which is essentially AIM), Jabber, and Google Talk (which is essentially Jabber), however it does now add the ability to sign into more than one of a particular service at the same time. If you have multiple AIM/.Mac and/or multiple Jabber/Google Talk names, you can sign into them simultaneously. However, what I was instantly disgusted to find out was that iChat gives you a separate buddy list window for each one. And, you know, my screen real estate is already limited, so I would really rather not have to deal with multiple windows on my screen. One thing that I will now always appreciate about Adium: All of my contacts among my different accounts are in one contact list, which is SO much nicer. So although the new iChat may permit you multiple logins, it’s still can’t get mutliple-service IM correct yet.

iChat now finally offers tabbed chatting so you can combine all of your chat sessions into a single window. This is so much nicer than the multiple chat windows that you originally had to deal with. What’s interesting, however, is that iChat actually does this by collecting all of the tabs into a sidebar, instead of showing physical tabs like Chax and Adium uses. However, this turned out not to be too big of a deal, and I like that if someone in another tab types a message, you see a preview of that message right in the sidebar. However, for a very strange reason, tabbed chatting is not on by default, and if you want to turn it on, you need to go into the Messages section of iChat preferences and hunt for the “Collect chats into a single window” option.

Some other features that have finally appeared in iChat are invisibility, animated buddy icons (which you can create for yourself in Photo Booth, by the way), persistent chat windows, AppleScript support, the ability to turn off alerts for a particular chat, the ability to set your default IM application, the ability to auto-start iChat on login and specify a keyboard shortcut to bring iChat to the front, customizable buddy list ordering, and support for SMS messaging. iChat 4 also adds new message views Boxes and Compact in addition to the already-existing Balloon and Text views. Also, borrowing a handy feature from IRC, iChat can alert you when someone calls your name in a group chat, and iChat adds a couple of new smilies to the mix. And iChat has a new File Transfer Manager which improves its already excellent file transferring abilities.

However, there is still one more “well, duh!” feature that Apple left out: a Chat Transcript Viewer! For Pete’s sake, iChat has all these abilities to log your chats, but why doesn’t it give you any easy UI for viewing these logs? (Never fear, a brand new version of Chax is available that brings a transcript viewer along with it.)

Even before you get to the fancy stuff, audio/video chatting has gotten some nice updates. For one thing, Apple has at last significantly improved iChat’s audio quality by using the AAC-LD codec, which means that the iChat sound quality is now comparable to that of Skype. You also finally have the ability to hide the little “self-preview” video from your video conference if you don’t want to see yourself in that chat window. And, another feature which has finally arrived is the ability to record audio and video chats. iChat saves the recordings as AAC (for audio) and MPEG-4 (for video) and also kindly asks your buddies for permission before the chat starts.

iChat brings along Photo Booth effects into the live video chats, although I really think that’s more of a “show off” feature without very much practicality to it. I mean, a photo of yourself looking weird from these effects is kind of funny, but to me, watching someone make themselves look distorted as a video doesn’t quite have the same amusing value. Between that and backdrops, where you replace your background with a different one and then step in front of it, that really seems to be a “look what I can do!” type of thing, and then it’s like, okay, let’s move on with our life. In short, I’m saying that I think the Photo Booth effects are more applicable to photos than to live video. Oh, and that’s not even getting into the other complaints that I’ve had about Photo Booth effects.

A much more useful feature, however, is iChat Theater. iChat Theater allows you to use an iChat video chat to do more than just have a conversation; you can now actually do something even more productive. Essentially, iChat Theater allows you to show your colleague any file that you have on your computer that is compatible with Quick Look. This means iPhoto slideshows, movies, presentations, images, documents, or anything else.

If you’re sharing an iPhoto slideshow in iChat theater, then you go to the File menu (in iChat) and select “Share iPhoto With iChat Theater.” For any other file, you do File > Share File With iChat Theater, or else drag the file onto the video chat window. In the cases of iPhoto and Keynote, those apps will open and you use their controls to move through the slideshow. Other apps give you a toolbar outside the video window to control the display of the file. The other person sees exactly what you see, however there’s is in the video chat window with a reflection on the bottom and your video is smaller on the lower left, and, oh yeah, they just get a read-only point of view. Nevertheless, for those cases where we just need to quickly show something off to someone, this has to be a lifesaver of a feature for collaboration.

Another cool new feature in iChat is that it now has built-in support for screen sharing, which makes it even easier for people to collaborate remotely on something. I cover Screen Sharing more in depth in my Leopard Feature Presentation on Screen Sharing, but I will say that tying the ability to share someone else’s screen to an IM application is one of those ideas that only Apple would think of, however again, it’s tied to the idea of iChat being an indicator of someone’s “presence.”

iChat certainly has a big bag of new features, but the new features are somewhat of a mixed blessing. iChat’s text chatting has been much improved, but they don’t really go far enough to pull me away from Adium (not to mention that I have a number of Yahoo! IM users that I need to stay in touch with). iChat, however, does make its “above and beyond” capabilities better by adding recording, iChat Theater, and screen sharing, among others, although other features such as the Photo Booth effects seem more ritzy and not very useful at all. Regardless, it is apparent that iChat is an application that Apple is dedicated to improving and innovating, and when the next version of iChat comes out alongside 10.6, I hope that it will be even better and I’ll give it another chance to win my heart back.

Feature Satisfaction Rating:

Be sure to check out the other articles in the Leopard Feature Presentation, occurring throughout the month of November here on Webmacster87.info.

Tags: Adium, AIM, audio, chat, Chax, collaboration, features, Google Talk, iChat, iChat Theater, Jabber, Leopard Feature Presentation, Mac, Mac OS X Leopard, preview, Quick Look, recording, review, Screen Sharing, sharing, text, Video