For color-blind users, this could be altered to show different shapes, circle (available), triangle (idle), and squares (away), to illustrate status with shape rather than color. With iChat, green (available), yellow (idle), and red (away) icons could be displayed next to the name of each connected user on the buddy list. IChat incorporated Apple's Aqua interface and used speech bubbles and pictures to personify the online chatting experience. One episode of the first season of the HBO dramedy series Entourage had Eric Murphy having an iChat conversation with Ari Gold, marking the first time that this application was used on a television series.
It featured integration with the Address Book and Mail applications and was the first officially supported AIM client that was native to Mac OS X (the first-party AIM application at the time was still running in Classic emulation).
IChat was first released in August 2002 as part of Mac OS X 10.2.
