. Audio Chats iChat becomes much more exciting when you exploit its AV Club capabilities. Even over a dial-up modem connection, you can conduct audio chats, speaking into your microphone and listening to the responses from your speaker. | . Audio Chats iChat becomes much more exciting when you exploit its AV Club capabilities. Even over a dial-up modem connection you can conduct audio chats speaking into your microphone and listening to the responses from your speaker. Figure 21-7. iChat can look like almost anything. Here for example is what a chat looks like with the balloon effect turned off giving you colored rectangles instead . You can even turn off balloons and pictures if they bother you that much. You can also hide the names if you like. You make these changes for a chat in progress using the View menu. You can also change the color and typeface settings in the iChat Preferences Messages panel If you have a broadband connection though you get a much more satisfying experience and if you have a pretty fast Mac up to 10 of you can join in one massive free conference call from across the Internet. Specifically you need a 867-megahertz G4 processor or faster to make audio calls with up to five people. To initiate an audio chat with six to 10 participants you need a Mac with an Intel processor a G5 chip a 1-gigahertz G4 chip or dual 800-megahertz G4s. A telephone icon next to a name in your buddy list tells you that the buddy has a microphone and is ready for a free Internet phone call. If you see what appear to be stacked phone icons then your pal s Mac has enough horsepower to handle a multipleperson conference call. You can see these icons back in Figure 21-2. POWER USERS CLINIC Bluetooth Headset Voice Chats If hollering at your computer isn t your preferred method of civilized conversation you can conduct your audio and video chats while wearing a Bluetooth headset instead. If you haven t paired your headset with your Mac yet go to iChat Preferences Audio Video and click the button for Set Up Bluetooth Headset. This fires up the Mac s Bluetooth Setup Assistant program to guide you through the process. After you get your Bluetooth headset married to your Mac go to System Preferences .
