The ability to paste inline images into iChat is one of the main features that differentiates it from other chat clients like Yahoo Messenger or ICQ. However, as many seasoned iChatters know, the iChat engine can be rather temperamental when it comes to allowing you to paste an image - sometimes it returns a "rend error", or sometimes it will completely refuse to accept the image into the chat window. Here are two solutions I found while browsing macosxhints.com. Hope this will be of help to some of you... "I got this little tidbit while in a chat with Kirk McElhearn (author of the upcoming book "Unix for Mac OS X: Learning the Command Line". I was having some trouble pasting an image to Kirk (getting the dreaded "Rend Error" each time). He suggested pressing the space bar before before pasting the image. Amazingly enough, it worked. Not just that one time, but most of my image pasting issues have vanished just by prefacing the pasted image with the space bar. I'll still get the very occasional error, but nothing near what I used to get -- thanks Kirk!" and "There are times when my iChat application seems to lose its ability to paste an image. This is different than the "rend errors" discussed in this previous hint. Instead, I get a message about AIM just not being able to send the message. Typically, this seems to happen after I've tried to paste a region capture to someone who's using GAIM on Linux or Adium or some other AIM client that doesn't support image transfer. Once I've seen the message once, iChat is incapable of pasting any images into any chats, even after quitting and restarting iChat. The only way I knew to clear it up was to logout and login, which is obviously time consuming, given that I've usually got 20 to 30 apps running. This weekend, while researching another issue, I stumbled across a solution that doesn't require a logout ... as mentioned in this hint about iChat's idle timeout, there's a background process called iChatAgent that continues to run even after you quit iChat. Solving my image pasting problems simply required quitting iChat, and then killing the existing agent in the Terminal: killall iChatAgent You could also use the Activity Monitor, but the Terminal is always close at hand on my machine. When you re-launch iChat, the Agent is re-started, and (at least on my machine) image pasting is once again functional."
And by the way ... ... the best "helper" application to use when pasting images into your chats, for me, is still the versatile (and free!) Snap'N'Drag screen capture utility from Yellow Mug Software.
Other tips. To avoid pdfs and large images from rendering on the chat window, it's better to drag and drop the huge file into the recipient's name in the buddy list rather than the chat input box. Your log-in picture and address book picture is also your iChat default avatar. "Busy" is more effective than "Away" Use blocking with caution. It's not foolproof. Common friends can actually blow your cover. When blocking unwanted people, the best thing to do is: 1. remove the offending person from your buddy list 2. then choose Privacy Level: "allow people in my buddy list" instead of "block specific people". The best way to end everything is with command+Q [Edited on 5-11-2004 by Carlo]
