Preferences dialog box gives you plenty of additional control. A few examples: General pane. If you turn on Show status in menu bar, you bring the iChat menulet to your menu bar. It lets you change your iChat status (Available, Away, and so on) | . iChat Tweaks If you ve done nothing but chat in iChat you haven t even scratched the surface. The iChat Preferences dialog box gives you plenty of additional control. A few examples General pane. If you turn on Show status in menu bar you bring the iChat menulet to your menu bar. It lets you change your iChat status Available Away and so on whether you re in iChat or not. And if you turn off When I quit iChat set my status to Offline then quitting iChat doesn t actually log you out. When someone wants a chat with you iChat opens automatically. The General pane is also where you tell iChat what to do when you re temporarily away from the Mac. You can have it automatically reply to chat invitations with your personalized I m not here message. When you come back to the Mac or wake it up from sleep you can have iChat flip your status from Away to Available all by itself. Accounts pane. If you have more than one AIM Jabber or .Mac account you can switch among them here. Your passwords are conveniently saved in your Mac OS X Keychain. Messages pane. The Messages preference panel lets you design your chat windows the background color word balloon color and typeface and size of text you type. GEM IN THE ROUGH iChat on Autopilot If you ve read this chapter all the way through then you know that iChat can respond to chat invitations by running an AppleScript. And if you ve read Chapter 7 you know that AppleScript is capable of. .almost anything. As a proof of concept Apple s AppleScript product manager has created a truly evil script that you can choose in the iChat Preferences Alerts Run AppleScript pop-up menu. It s called iChat Autopilot you can download it from this book s Missing CD page at . In short this very special script simulates your end of the chat. It carries on a fairly generic conversation periodically typing perfectly plausible all-purpose utterances occasion-ally excusing yourself while you answer the doorbell and otherwise .
