Using animated icons in iChat
iChat in Leopard supports animated icons, but they’re a bit quirky.
First, make sure they’re enabled:
Next, find an animated icon like the sample one shown here.
Notice how the constant motion is a little annoying? That’s something you’ll need to watch out for with your own animated icons. The human visual system is hardwired to notice movement, making any motion hard to ignore. (…spinning…spinning…)
Your friends won’t like it if your icon drives them insane, so be sure to use restraint with the animation.
Having selected an animated icon, drop it onto your picture in your buddy list, or click your buddy picture and choose Edit Picture… from the popup menu and paste it in. Once you’ve added the new icon you should see it animated, right there in your buddy list. Your friends should also see it.
Now, when you chat, your icon will animate in the chat window. But only your most recent entry animates. The others display the first frame only. And even your most recent entry stops animating while your friends are typing. When you’re typing, your friends see your icon stop animating in the chat window. It stops animating in their buddy lists, too. This behavior seems slightly unpredictable and perhaps will see improvement in an upcoming system update.
A website called Watching Apple and your doing an article on animated icons in ichat. Come on folks this is old news or should be I was expecting some with a little more substance. There already are to many websites out there pertaining to the mac that feature articles with lots of fluff and little else.
Hi crosseyed, I try to alternate between trenchant commentary on all things Apple and simpler posts like this one, as should be evident in the list of previous articles. Regarding this post in particular, I’ve been surprised at the number of questions I’ve received and seen about whether iChat handles animated icons. Of course it does, but apparently many people remain unaware of this, hence the post.
I agree that there are many sites out there with fluffy little articles. I therefore endeavor to keep my own lighter posts either laconically fresh or humorously subversive.
For all the people that ask about animated icons in iChat there are even more that post questions about this capability in Mail.app and would have focused on a combination of the two in the article. I guess I take it for granted that something that should be painfully obvious isn’t. And lets just be thankful we don’t live in a windows world being mac users as it were.