Tiger Bits: iChat Weirdness

Actually, the reason for this, woud be that you can now use the Jabber protocoll in iChat. This enables you to use all other services (MSN, ICQ & Yahoo) through Jabber servers. And as far as I know, both Jabber and ICQ allows you to send messages to offline contacts (Hence, why the chat-input doesn't dissapear for offline contacts). As for why those services allow you to send to offline contacts, it's because they, unlike AOL, MSN and Yahoo, don't have e-mail services (and ad-revenue) that would loose out to chat if you weren't forced to use (advertised) e-mail to communicate to offline contacts. There. Was that convoluted enough? :-P

Oh, thank GOD. I am so tired of switching to Fire in Panther in order to chat with people who are ghosting.

yeah this is for the offline buddys that you are talking to. i requested this feature of apple all the time. i dont know what you aer talking about with teh sending images. it works great for me and has since i got tiger a while back.

also, you can't be logged in at two places anymore, use to be that on my HiptopII I could leave AIM turned on, and log into my mac without a problem and have them both running... now with the new ichat it boots off my hiptop (or any aim client you use) and only lets that instance of ichat online.

Isn't it also something to do with the fact that now you are supposed to be able to leave messages for offline buddies?

Its because in AIM for windows you can "appear offline" while still being able to IM people. My friend did this once, and it pissed me off so much, because his IM's came through, but I couldn't respond.