eclecticism

04/03/2004 |

That was more than a little odd. I was just in a conversation with Phil, and wanted to blog some of it. Normally I use iChat in “cute” mode (pictures and bubbles), like so:

iChat's 'cute' mode When I want to blog a conversation, I’ll switch it to “text” and “show names”, which works much better for a copy-paste into a weblog post:

p align=”center”> iChat in text mode

However, for some reason, iChat just went all wierd on me. When I switched it into text and names mode, everything in the chat window went blank. I could see what I was typing in the text input field, and hear when messages came through by the “bloop” sound…but I couldn’t see anything!

p align=”center”> iChat goes wonky

Thankfully, closing out the window and starting a new chat session cleared it up, but I was quite amused for a few moments there.

iTunes: “Pink Potassium” by Radioactive Goldfish from the album Rhythm and Rave (1992, 4:46).

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2 Responses to “iChat just went bye-bye”

Chas Redmond Says:
April 3rd, 2004 at 8:24 pm

I’ve had iChat quit on my when I was uploading JPEGs into the window. It’s done this on several occasions. I believe iChat, even though it claims to be version 2.1, still has a lot of characteristics of a version 1 program.

On the other hand, you can select the contents of an iChat window and drag them to the desktop - which is very Mac-like and way cool - drop those little text/image clippings into an email or otherwise use them in another program. That might be a more reliable method of stashing an online chat session.

AxsDeny Says:
April 4th, 2004 at 7:42 am

It hasn’t happened much since 2.1 went live, but in 1.0 and the A/V beta it happened whenever I selected conversation lines. I thought they ironed most of this issue out with the release of the 2.1 but it appears not. Good to know this is happening to someone else (in the sense that my machine, in particular, isn’t going crazy).