The bulk of Chax has made its way to Snow Leopard, but the form has changed a bit. Instead of a plugin, Chax now appears as it’s own program. When you run it, it automatically loads iChat with all the additional functionality added in. The Snow Leopard version (in alpha prerelease) is available from the author’s blog.
Like many people, I have both a desktop and a laptop. The desktop has a considerably larger hard drive and occasionally I need to access a file that’s not on my laptop. I usually do this by remotely accessing my desktop over the internet, but this means I have to keep my computer on all day, which is not necessary a good use of power.
Snow Leopard adds a new feature called Wake On Demand which, provided you’ve got an Airport Base Station or Time Capsule, wakes up your computer when needed for network access. You can set up an automatic sleep schedule so it goes back to sleep when you’re done.
Growl is a popular, and free notification package for the Mac that is supported by a wide range of programs (e.g. Adium, Chax, Cyberduck, Dropbox, and many more). Its messages appear as transient floating bubbles, typically in the corner of the screen, fading away after just enough time. The current version (1.1.6) reportedly works relatively well in Snow Leopard. However, it runs in the less efficient 32-bit mode and some features don’t work properly. Luckily, the Growl team is hard at work on a new update (version 1.2) which is being targeted for release tomorrow.
If you don’t already have Growl running on your Mac, you really should.
Update: The Growl 1.2 beta is now available.
I like several features of iChat (video chat, integration, stability), but find it lacks the slickness of Adium. Each time I make the jump to Adium, I find myself coming back to iChat for its core functionality.
One free plugin, however, makes the whole experience much more enjoyable. Chax adds a unified contact list (useful if you use multiple accounts, like both AIM and Google Chat), remembers old messages, adds Growl notifications, options for auto-accepting chats, and automatic resizing of the contact list window, among others.
It’s an odd time to be promoting Chax, as it’s not compatible with Snow Leopard, which will be out in 2 days. However, the author’s Twitter feed offers some hope. In response to a question about a beta version for SL, he states: “Not yet. Hang in there for a bit longer.” It will be worth it.
Yes.
As suspected, Snow Leopard is now available for preorder from the Apple Store. Don’t be a chump and line up for this thing. Just mail order from Apple and it will get delivered on the day of release.
Yesterday was rife with rumors of a August 28 release for Snow Leopard after some Apple Stores in other countries showed that as the release date. They’ve since been updated to “September”, and now there are rumors of a new version of SL floating about (10A435), newer than the previous version that was supposed to be GM (10A432). This version apparently had evidence of “social” (Facebook and Twitter) integration into the Address Book app.
This seems fishy to me. It’s too late to introduce significant new functionality if a September release is planned, and we’ve already seen what looks like the final product packaging and disc.
My guess is that there was no announcement yesterday because of the focus on Apple’s response to the Google Voice FCC inquiry.
In either case, we should know something Monday. Either there will be a new version released to developers, an announcement, or some indication of where things are headed.
I’m not exactly sure when this appeared (presumably iPhone OS 3.0), but when you add a phone number to a contact on the iPhone, one of your options for the phone type is “iPhone” (along with mobile, work, home, etc.). Makes me wonder if Apple has some special functionality planned in the future that will take advantage of knowing that you are calling (or being called from) an iPhone.
My new monochromatic look for Infobhan is now live. It will look like crap on Internet Explorer 6, but it’s not worth recoding just to work with this out of date browser.
I’ve got a new design in the works that’s going to redefine blogs as we know it.
Get ready.
You ready yet?
Okay, I’ll give you a little more time.
But not too much more…
While we’re waiting, where is Snow Leopard? This thing was supposed to be GM last week. No release date, no nothing.