iChat: Time To Chat In A Better Way On Mac

iChat is an application which comes inbuilt with your MacBook and provides you with an excellent interface to stay connected with your friends, family, co-workers in a more personal way. You can hear and see your close ones irrespective of how far they are from you. It lets you do text chat, audio chat, or video chat over the Internet without accruing any text messaging, long distance, or video streaming charges.
To use iChat, you just need to get connected to the Internet and should have one of the following accounts: iCloud, MobileMe, Google Talk, Yahoo, or Jabber. Below you can see how to setup the contact.

Open iChat from the Dock or from the Applications folder.

You just have to follow the instructions on the screen to configure iChat. If you don’t have a me.com account or Mac.com account yet, open System Preferences and click iCloud preferences. Then click “Create an Apple ID” to sign up for a free one. You can get an account name that ends with @me.com. This account works within the AIM network so you can use iChat to chat with your AIM buddies.

Once everything is configured, iChat opens and displays the different kinds of iChat buddies. You can see here who all are online to chat. Your account appears at the top; your current status should show you as being “Available.

If you want to change your status, click your status and choose a new one from the pop-up menu. You can choose one of the existing status messages such as Away, or choose Custom Available and type your own customized status message.

If your computer has in inbuilt mic or an external one, you can see a green phone icon next to your picture which signals to your buddies that you are available for audio chat.

 If you have a built-in camera, USB camera, or FireWire camera (such as iSight or DV) connected to your computer, a movie camera icon displays to let your iChat buddies know that you’re available to video chat
To add a friend you can simply choose Buddies then Add Buddy. Select the kind of account your buddy has. iChat can help searching through the Address Book. Then choose the group you want to add that person to.  Then click Add. So one friend has added to your friend list.

You can do text chatting, video chatting, iChat theatre, multi person chatting and share screen with your buddies by just clicking on the icons that appear on your screen while you are using iChat.

For iChat theatre you have to choose from the File option, Share a File with iChat Theatre.