Show off (without showing up)

Why wait for a darkened room and a projector to present holiday photos or Keynote slides? Now you can do it all remotely, right in iChat. Put on an entire photo slideshow, click through a Keynote presentation or play a movie — in full screen, accompanied by a video feed of you hosting — with your friends looking on. In fact, you can show any file on your system that works with Quick Look.

Chatting for the record

Now you can save your audio and video chats for posterity with iChat recording. Before recording starts, iChat notifies your friends and asks for their permission to record. When you’ve finished chatting, iChat stores your audio chats as AAC files and video chats as MPEG-4 files so you can play them in iTunes or QuickTime. Share them with colleagues, friends and family, or sync them to your iPod and play them on the go.

Instant video chats and IM

Visit home anytime and never miss a lecture. The built-in iSight camera on iMac, MacBook and MacBook Pro makes it easy to video chat with up to three friends or family members at once. Of course, iChat is also a versatile instant text messaging application, supporting AIM and Jabber Instant Messenger clients. Icons and thought bubbles make it fun to see who’s saying what, and you can transmit any kind of file — from a web address to a photo — by simply dragging it into your chat. Pictures display right in the message window, web links open with a click. In short, iChat is the best way to IM.