iChat's "aqua" style bubbles in a text chat are one of the tell-tale signs that it's a Apple product you are using. While this makes instant messaging not only very easy to do, it also let you enjoy that polished, crisp visual look that Apple and Mac OS X in general are known for. However, believe it or not, there are several alternate views you can use for displaying your text chats within the program. Why would one want to change the display of their text chat from the lovely balloon style we see by default? Well, while they may not be as nice looking, there are actually three other view modes that can be used when you need to see your chats in a more condensed format, thus making them even easier to read in certain situations! For example, if you are having a very lengthy conversation with someone and using the default iChat balloons, you may need to scroll up quite a bit in your chat window to see previous parts of the conversation. This is especially true when you are in a group chat since chat transcripts for groups tend to grow very long very quickly with just a few people in a chat room!

Of course, changing the look of your iChat bubbles is easy. When you are in a text chat, just right-click (or Control-click) in anywhere in the white space of the chat window. A pop-up menu appears where you can change the display of the chat bubbles in one of four ways: Show as Balloons, the shiny aqua bubbles we see by default, Show as Boxes, simple round rectangles to represent each chat entry, Show as Compact, small boxes around each chat entry with a handy time stamping included along the right hand side, or even Show as Text, simple highlighted text for each chat entry presented in a linear fashion. So the next time you need to see even more your text chat, this little trick may be just what you need to get the job done!