Chax
Warp
GlyphaChax Version Status
I’m back on my old hosting service, so a number of posts and comments were lost in the move over. Apologies to anyone who was unable to get to the site while it was down.
For those of you who are running Leopard, installing Chax will cause iChat to crash on launch. New versions of Chax will prevent this from happening but I don’t expect to update Chax for Leopard until a final release is available. Even better, it seems that iChat is greatly improved for Leopard, making many of the features in Chax unnecessary.
August 13th, 2006 at 4:57 am
The “Disable close buttons on tabs” function (on the “Tabs” tab in the Chax prefs) only seems to remove the visual element of the close button on the tabs; it doesn’t actually disable the close function, at least not for me. If I click at the left-most portion of a tab, it closes. Is this the expected behavior?
August 13th, 2006 at 3:12 pm
Hi,
I had a small feature request… this is driving me crazy! I use Apple-L all the time to enter URL’s in Safari, and find myself accidentally being in an iChat window when I press it, which is a hotkey for “logoff.” Would there be any way to add the same warning dialog that you’ve added for Apple-Q? It’d be a lifesaver!
Thanks for your great work, Chax is an excellent piece of software!
Chris
August 14th, 2006 at 7:03 am
hey there. good job on the chax, man. these add-on features are sweet. 2 questions though: 1, leopard came out already? (you said in your blog “for those of you who are running leopard”). and 2, can you make a feature so that when you press shift+return it makes a new line? the previous AIM apps (like AIM 4.7 on os 10/9 and others before) have it but ichat doesn’t. so sometimes i get confused about being able and not being able to do it. thanks
August 14th, 2006 at 7:59 am
calvin – Option(alt) + Return produces a new line in the iChat text entry field.
August 14th, 2006 at 10:40 am
in 1.4.5 “disable close buttons on tabs” does not work
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in 1.4.5 “disable close buttons on tabs” does not work. if i check it, the x dissappears from the tab but the chat will now close if i click on the name in the tab. this makes it impossible to select some chats because clicking on the person you want to talk to closes the chat
August 14th, 2006 at 10:42 am
re “in 1.4.5 “disable close buttons on tabs” does not work”
ooops! i didnt notice that someone already noted that bug. sorry
August 14th, 2006 at 10:48 am
calvin: A very limited number of people have access to Leopard seeds from WWDC.
Disabling close buttons doesn’t work properly in 1.4.5. 1.4.6b1 fixes this problem.
August 14th, 2006 at 11:40 pm
Is it possible you could release a beta version of Chax that works in Leopard? I’m working on it and I’d like to see it going on there.
August 15th, 2006 at 12:07 pm
Any chance you could get ichat to recognize aim: style urls? This would be a fantastic help.
Thanks, great toolset!
August 15th, 2006 at 11:20 pm
Forgive me if this has been asked already. It looks like there isn’t any way to have just 1 buddy list in leopard. is there anyway to merge 2 buddy lists into 1? AIM and Jabber into one buddy list window
August 16th, 2006 at 2:32 am
thanks kent and osxrulz. learned something new today. anyways i have 1 more suggestion: you know how on yahoo messenger and i think on AIM triton too, there’s an option to sign on as invisible? is there a way a future update of chax can include this too?
lucky people that have leopard…
August 16th, 2006 at 2:40 am
Michael: I’m not planning on releasing a version of Chax that works in Leopard for some time. It is still way too early to try to make a large number of changes to fit into iChat in Leopard since a lot of stuff is likely to change between now and the final release.
Thomas: As far as I know, iChat already recognizes aim: URLs. You might want to take a look at the helper settings registration with an application like RCDefaultApp
Eric: I’m not dealing with Leopard issues currently, as the final release of Leopard is still some time off. In 10.4 I haven’t been able to get all of the buddy lists combined.
calvin: Invisibility is something that Apple is adding to iChat with Leopard. It isn’t possible for Chax to add invisibility in the current version of iChat though.
August 16th, 2006 at 9:18 pm
Chax is a awesome app, but one thing I wish it did was take the fonts from custom contact list fonts (if used) and use them in names in tabs…any plan on adding this?
August 17th, 2006 at 12:00 pm
This is rather random, but I was just talking to my friend and we thought of a good suggestion for future Chax programs. I don’t how this could be done, but if the users that are on their mobile phones could be sorted to the bottom, or have their dot change to blue, etc. it would be very very handy. Let me know what you think.
August 18th, 2006 at 5:18 pm
Since we are a business we need to record our chats. However, we notice that other chat applications send out an automatic message when a chat is initialized warning the user that the chat is being recorded. This feature would be VERY useful for us as well.
So please consider adding an automatic greeting to your great program.
August 19th, 2006 at 1:23 pm
sorry, me again. i just thought of a feature: how about a notifier that shows when the person you are talking to closed the chat window? i noticed a lot of my friends (and the people that i talk to but realize don’t like me) always close their chat windows while they’re talking. the friends, because their screen gets too cluttered (pc users), and the people i talk to but realize don’t like me, cuz well… they don’t like me. this is just a random feature i thought of a few minutes ago. thanks again for the help on my previous suggestions/question and good job on chax again.
August 19th, 2006 at 6:35 pm
Mike: Custom fonts in the tabs probably won’t be happening. The tab display style isn’t really meant to have its appearance changed.
Chris: iChat in Leopard will have this feature. I’ll see if I can make this happen for iChat in Tiger though.
Clark: What other applications warn users that messages are being logged? I’m not aware of any other IM clients on the Mac that do this. I don’t know if this is possible to do, but I’ll keep it in mind.
Calvin: The AIM protocol doesn’t send any sort of notification that a user has closed their window, so your suggestion isn’t possible. The only exception to this is when you’re connected through a direct IM (iChat will notify when the connection has been closed, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the other user closed the IM window).
August 19th, 2006 at 11:37 pm
Lots of people thinking chax can alter protocols between ichat and server or vice versa..Send those to bugreport.apple.com through feature suggestion form and free adc account. Chax can ONLY hack the local client and nothing that relates to server what so ever therefor features like invisible etc cannot and will not ever be possible…
As for the aim urls. ichat supports them to an extent but not as well as aim 4.7 for mac…Like it’ll work for basic things like openim but nothing fancy like open chat room name “bob”. I’d have to test again though to see where t became limited…
August 20th, 2006 at 12:35 am
AIM Triton supports this, so I was wondering if chax can too,
In the duration of one AIM chat session, you can have it set on triton so that if someone IM’s you in your current session, and you have logging enabled, and you close the window, if you open up another chat with the same person in the same session, the chat window will contain the conversation to the extent of the current session.
(I really hope that this is understandable, I couldn’t think of a better way to explain it)
August 21st, 2006 at 6:02 pm
It appears that the installer doesn’t work on a Mac Pro.
iChat 3.1.5 v440
framework v427
August 21st, 2006 at 9:58 pm
Hey great job with all the programming. chax is great except that I gust got a new computer. well its an old computer and I got it free from my dad’s work. anyway it runs 10.3 and as far as i can see there is no chax for that system. I guess i don’t know if you even made one back then, but if you have is there anyway i can get it for my new-old comp?
Thanks, Austin
August 22nd, 2006 at 6:43 am
I want to translate this very interasting software product -> russian & belorussian languages
mail me please
August 22nd, 2006 at 8:50 pm
Hi there, was just wondering if anyone else has been having issues with the misalignment of status icons and user names on the buddy list. I changed the buddy list typeface using Chax, and now the icons don’t line up with the names. Any ideas?
August 22nd, 2006 at 8:50 pm
PS: Thank you for a very useful and well constructed tool.
August 23rd, 2006 at 1:16 pm
Just a minor feature request – it would be awesome if the display of the windows could be revamped to look like the as-of-yet-unreleased iChatv4 to be included with OS X 10.5 Leopard. It’s the same style change that’s happening to other Mac OS X applications; the new window look that ditches the old brushed-aluminum look. A screenshot can be found on http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/index.html if you scroll down a bit.
Thanks for a great app,
icefall64
August 23rd, 2006 at 5:30 pm
If possible, could you make it so that you get a non-audio notification for when you get a message? it’s kind of annoying to be palying a game and then 10 minutes later your friends have all been yelling at you and eventually leaving.
That aside, I think you have made an amazing set of additions to iChat. It’s really helped me organize my stuff. You should be working for Apple.
August 23rd, 2006 at 8:33 pm
Hi there,
I’m not sure if this has been addressed already, but I seem to get an issue with the Buddy List resizing incorrectly when I wake my laptop (G4PB 1.5). I do a lot of work in different places and my network settings change frequently during the day. If I have iChat running I get a full-height buddy list pane but the buddy list doesn’t start until halfway down, and there’s a huge gap of brushed silver between my account and my buddies.
Please mail me if you need a screenshot.
It’s just a cosmetic thing, really, asnd fixes itself when I restart iChat.
Otherwise, a great set of features. Thank you.
August 26th, 2006 at 4:40 am
can something be done to make the message windows more narrow?
August 27th, 2006 at 4:04 pm
hey, your program is great! I was wondering would it be possible to add a feture that would allow you to shrik the ichat window down below the constraits? I don’t know how hard that would be, i was just thinking it would be a cool feture.
Thanks!
August 30th, 2006 at 8:10 pm
hello, love the program, the feature i am most interested in doesn’t seem to be persistent: the window/always on top. if i restart ichat it becomes unchecked. is this correct behavior. any way to make it persistent. 1.4.6b1 running 10.4.6
August 31st, 2006 at 8:36 pm
Hi
I have a feature request : by analogy with the «set status to away when screen saver starts», It would be very nice to have the possibility to set the status to away when an application of choice starts (typically VLC : I don’t want to be disturbed when I watch a movie
)
Thanks in advance
September 1st, 2006 at 1:36 am
I’ve just installed Chax this week and it’s great, though I’ve noticed one quirk. If iChat is closed when I first receive a message over AIM, then the timestamps in the chat window are white-on-white and thus unreadable. The background of the chat window is black.
If iChat is already open when I receive a new message which starts a chat, the timestamps are readable and the background of the chat window is white.
I’d be happy to send you screenshots if that would be helpful.
Thanks,
–mkb
September 4th, 2006 at 3:12 pm
Whenever i send a picture, it takes about 10 seconds for it to connect but i always get an error message saying:
“An AIM error has occurred. The server message was: Rend:Cancelled
Direct Instant Message session refused”
this message comes up about a minute after the picture has been sent and recieved by the person i am chatting with. kinda weird.
September 4th, 2006 at 10:49 pm
joven, that has nothing to do with chax…the person may be using sofftware not compatible with ichat (which is pretty much all clients including ichat sometimes)…or they just really refused your request..
September 6th, 2006 at 3:14 am
If you don’t have anything better to do when Leopard comes out, have you thought about adding tabs to Terminal.app?
(off topic, but I couldn’t find your email address)
September 7th, 2006 at 12:27 am
A small bug fix/feature request:
I keep my chat windows flush with the left side of the screen. If I have more than one tab open, and I attempt to close the window, the dialogue box pops up asking if I wish to close all tabs. This has the side effect of shifting the window to the right. iChat then takes this rightward-shifted window position as the default, and the next time I open a chat window, I have to move it back to the left so it is flush to the screen. Easy fixes I can think of would be to either let the dialogue box close (and the window return to its original position) before the window closes, or else add an option to disable the dialogue pop-up.
Thanks.
September 7th, 2006 at 4:31 am
Awesome awesome software. This clinched my conversion from Adium to iChat.
It looks like plenty of people have already pointed out the “disable close tabs” feature doesn’t work at all (ie. is only cosmetic).
I have one other bug fix/feature request myself. Would it be possible to add a history plugin like Adium’s? For those not familiar with it, it takes the last ten lines of your last conversation with a person, date stamps it, and pastes them into the latest conversation with a person (with appropriate visual cues that it is a “history” and not part of the active chat).
Also, anything you can do to improve Jabber support would be awesome, but I assume that is more of an upstream sort of thing. Thanks again for the great work.
September 8th, 2006 at 12:33 pm
Hi, I was just wondering where chax stores the information found in the Activity window for if I ever want to back it up.
Thanks
September 8th, 2006 at 7:25 pm
Kent: GREAT job on a wonderful supplement to iChat. I discovered the Activity log and almost ready to stop using another app to record the same info. Is there a way to save or archive the data shown in the Activity log? A Save As … would be great, or formatting the ~/library/application support/chax/activity.chax file so that it contenst could be read (by TextEdit or Safari maybe). Thanks and keep up the great work!!
September 9th, 2006 at 12:58 am
Also, in the current release (haven’t used the beta) every-time I open up the log viewer, it asks to try and correct the date, even if I clicked yes the previous time.
September 10th, 2006 at 4:54 pm
Feature request: Would it be possible to set up iChax to direct file transfers from particular users in my buddy list to go to particular folders? I use the file transfer feature in iChat heavily. However, ALL the files are going into the same folder. At times, I have no way of knowing who sent what. I would like the option to set up a folder for each user (Buddy) so that any transfer from that Buddy goes into their own folder, wherever I set that folder to be.
Thank you for iChax and it’s continuous development.