Section 68. Set Up Your Picture


68. Set Up Your Picture

BEFORE YOU BEGIN

67 Set Up Your AIM or .Mac Account


SEE ALSO

95 Add a Person to Your Address Book


After you've set up your iChat account, it's time for the most critical part of all: choosing your picture. This picture is what represents you visually in a chat with another person, so you should choose something that accurately depicts your personality, your likes and dislikes, and your usual mood. Or you'll just want to find something nice and silly to use.

iChat starts you out using the picture from your card in Address Book, if you have defined one, or your Mac OS X login picture. You can tell iChat to use a different picture by simply dragging it into iChat from the Finder (or even straight from a web page).

68. Set Up Your Picture


1.
Drag in a Picture

Launch iChat, using the icon in the Dock or in the Applications folder. Make sure that one of your iChat windows is visibleeither your Buddy List or one of the Bonjour or Jabber lists (select one from the Window menu if one is not visible). Either window shows your picture in the upper-right corner of the window.

TIP

Try to choose a picture that's "facing right"that will look good at the left side of a chat window. Although on your side of a chat, your picture appears on the right side of the window, your chat partners see your picture on the left side of their windows. For aesthetic reasons, the picture you choose to represent you should show you facing right (towards your text) rather than left.

Open the Finder and locate the picture you want to use. Drag it to the square containing your current picture in iChat. You can even drag an image from a Safari window, if you find a picture on the Web that you'd like to use.

2.
Crop the Picture

The Buddy Picture picture-editing screen appears, showing the picture you've dragged into iChat. Use the slider below the picture to set the "aperture" size, or the size of the square that defines your iChat picture relative to the whole picture you've dragged in. You can scale down the entire picture to fit into the square, or you can select only a small portion if you prefer. Click and drag in the picture window to set where the square is centered, and click Set when you're satisfied with how it looks.

3.
Take a Video Snapshot

If you have a digital video camera hooked up to your Mac over FireWire, the Take Video Snapshot button at the bottom of the Buddy Picture widow becomes active. Click the button; the output from your video camera appears in the picture-editing window. A series of beeps sounds, becoming progressively quicker; as the beeps speed up, aim the camera at yourself (or at anything else you want to take a picture of), and in a few seconds iChat will freeze-frame an image, using whatever is on the camera at the time. You can then edit the image using the aperture and drag tools in the Buddy Picture window.

Just about any kind of digital video camera will work with the login picture selector; any FireWire camera that iChat recognizes will activate the feature. Apple's iSight and other FireWire webcams are ideal, but you can also use a standard digital camcorder; just connect it to your computer, put it in standby mode, and the video signal will automatically be picked up by the system and used in the video snapshot.

NOTE

G3-based Macs slower than 600MHz cannot use iChat's video capabilities, and thus the Take Video Snapshot option is also unavailable (iChat will say that videoconferencing is not supported on this computer).

TIP

To invoke the picture-cropping window directly without dragging in a new picture, select Change My Picture from the Buddies menu.

If you don't like your snapshot, you can immediately take another one by clicking the Take Video Snapshot button again. Keep trying until you have a picture you like.

4.
Select from Previously Used Pictures

While you're using iChat, you can change your picture immediately to any picture you've used in the past. Click your current picture in either the Buddy List, Bonjour , or Jabber List window, and a sheet showing all your recently used pictures appears. Click the picture you want to switch to, and it becomes your active picture.



MAC OS X Tiger in a Snap
Mac OS X Tiger in a Snap
ISBN: 0672327066
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2001
Pages: 212
Authors: Brian Tiemann

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