iChat and ICQ - a simple bug that takes forever to fix

AIM and ICQ use the same protocol, even the same login servers. As AIM is hugely popular in the US, ICQ is the messenger of choice in Germany. Both protocols are identical, and (depending on the client) even interoperable. You can also often take an AIM client, log in with your ICQ credentials and use it as an ICQ client.

Enter iChat.

iChat does all this: One can take his ICQ number and use it as if it was an AIM login. If I remember correctly, this was possible since the very early versions. With multiple logins in Leopard, AIM and ICQ accounts can even be used at the same time, and the user can take advantage of all the cool new Features of iChat like Screen sharing, presentations with the “theater mode” or video effects.

But, as with most things that look sweet and easy in theory, there are some serious drawbacks when it comes to reality. There is a bug, present since day tone, that it never got fixed. If you log into iCat with an ICQ login and send a message to another ICQ user who is not using iChat, the message contains all the markup for the colourful bubbles. It is hardly readable for the receiver.

There was a way around this on Tiger: Chax, a small untility that enhanced iChat with a lot of features such as tabbed chats and Growl support, corrected this bug. But Chax is not available yet in Leopard. This issue is propably very easy to fix and would take an Apple engineer five minutes of is time. So I filed Bug reports, talked to iChat engineers at WWDC, and so on but they always forgot to fix it. Unlike a lot of my friends here, nobody in the US and especially nobody at Apple seems to use ICQ.

So if you have an Apple Developer Account and happen to use ICQ once in a while, please help me in making this problem visible to someone who can fix it and file a bugreport at bugreporter.apple.com. The ID of the Bug I filed is 4675432

I’m still continuing to use iChat for ICQ, but if you happen to be an ICQ User not dong the same, I have some accounts with other messengers until someone at Apple finally fixes that bug:

• AIM: gernotpoetsch
• Jabber: my first name at gmail.com

• Skype: gernotpoetsch

  Thank you!

  Apple