One iChat window to rule to them all

The latest beta of Chax now adds vertically-oriented tabs to iChat. Finally, you can combine all your iChat conversations into one compact window.

“But wait, apps like Adium and previous versions of Chax have had tabbed browsing for ages,” you say. True true, but they only allow Safari-style horizontal tabs. This is fine for 3 to 4 conversations. It’s useless if you have more. For the iChat-whore with many chats, vertically-oriented tabs save much more space.

Chax lets you place tabs to the left or right of a chat window. If you still prefer clunky horizontal tabs, you can place them at the top or bottom.

As an alternative, check out Proteus. It comes with vertically-oriented tabs and supports multiple protocols (AIM, Yahoo, MSN, ICQ, Jabber). Sadly, it won’t support voice or video conferencing and sucks at file sharing.

If you’re patient, unlike me, you can also wait for the spanking new iChat in Mac OS X Leopard. But why wait, when there’s Chax?

Download Chax 1.4.8 Beta 1.