Chax – iChat On Steriods

Ed recently informed me of this program called Chax. After a quick Google, I was downloading the latest version of this piece of software.

Simply put, Chax beefs up iChat and adds in a ton of really needed and useful features that Apple left out. One of the best features is tabbed chatting. Now when I chat with 10+ people I won’t have 10+ iChat windows cluttering up my screen. If anyone uses tabs in Safari or FireFox then you’ll be quite familiar with how the tabbing system works. Essentially my 10+ chat windows are compressed into 1 chat window. A tab is created for each person that I am chatting with so that I can just click on the tab and it switches to their chat.

Chax not only adds tabbing but allows you to set the fonts of your buddy list window, you can animate buddy icons, if your friends have multiple screenames you can choose which one you would like to instant message, you can display status message changes right in the instant messaging window, show amount of unread IMs right in the dock icon, continue doing video chats when you’re transferring files, disable picture-in-picture video, set auto-accepting for file transfers, a built-in log viewer and so so much more.

I’ve only been using Chax for about a week now but I really love it! For any iChat user this addon application is a must have. There was one thing I didn’t like which was you needed to keep the install file around to uninstall Chax if you wanted to. Other then that, Chax really adds a good amount and adds much needed functionality to iChat. You can visit the above link to download Chax for free!