Here’s a new beta with a couple of small improvements and bug fixes. There are still two outstanding bugs that a limited number of people are encountering: some incoming messages not appearing properly when auto-accept is enabled, and crashes when waking from sleep. I’ve been having trouble reproducing these issues myself, despite having consistent reports on reproducing the problems. I still hope to fix these two problems in the future.

The unified contact list behavior has been changed slightly in order to better suit differences in usage. There is now an option to either explicitly use the unified list. If this option is not checked, selecting “Buddy List…” from the iChat menu extra and clicking on the iChat dock icon will not automatically display the unified contact list. Be sure to check this option if you generally use only the unified contact list. The synchronization issues between the unified contact list and individual accounts should be fixed in this release.

The syntax for enabling the option to strip the background color from outgoing messages is the following Terminal command: defaults write com.ksuther.chax StripOutgoingBackgroundColor -bool YES. Swap YES or NO to disable the option. You may need to restart iChat for changes to take effect.

Changes from Chax 2.1.1:

• (New) Quick Look support for inline image transfers (available by right-clicking an image)
• (New) Contact lists can now be sorted by user handle (View menu -> Sort Buddies -> By Handle)
• (New) New default to strip background color of outgoing messages (StripOutgoingBackgroundColor)
• (New) Russian localization (thanks to Denis Avdeev)
• (Change) The unified contact list can now be set as the primary contact list in the Chax preferences
• (Bug) Unified contact list should now stay in sync properly with all accounts
• (Bug) Auto-replies to ICQ users are now properly stripped
• (Bug) Name notifications in the Dock now truncate better
• (Bug) Selecting “All Contacts” from the Window menu now toggles unified contact list visibility
• (Bug) Can now make all accounts invisible at once with the unified contact list

Download Chax 2.1.2 Beta 1