I run across people all the time who simply aren’t aware of what great software is available for making your instant messaging experience so much better. So, I’ve taken some notes and I’m ready to share a wealth of knowledge with you.

Chat Transcript Manager

This is a cool application which lets you organize, search, and manage your saved conversations from popular IM clients such as iChat, Fire, and Adium. Very useful for looking up stuff from previous conversations and works across all of the clients, so doesn’t matter in which one you last talked to the person in.

Chax

This is a very important addon to iChat. Talk about features you didn’t know you were missing!

Tabbed conversations, disabling picture-in-picture for video conversations, dock icon settings, Growl support and so much more. You have to get this to see everything that Chax adds to iChat.

CallWave SMS Widget

Small widget that lets you send text messages to mobile phones, for free. And you don’t even need a phone yourself. You can have all replies be sent to your phone or to an email address. Very nice little widget, and it’s free!

Links from the Show

I mentioned several links for this episode, so here they are:
I Love My Mac Giveaway from macCompanion
Download Chax
Read the article I wrote about Growl – useful for using Chax
Download Chat Transcript Manager
Download CallWave SMS Widget