Apple first offered iChat in 2002, as part of Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar. Though I’ve tried iChat repeatedly with various releases of newer versions of the Mac OS, I always end up abandoning the software for the free, open-source Adium instead. iChat has long had one major leg up on Adium—its built-in support for audio and video chatting—but other Adium features offered enough improvement over iChat that I considered Apple’s instant messaging (IM) tool an also-ran.
