What the... iChat starting up on its own?

[mkrishnan]

Show Status in Menu Bar is what runs the iChatAgent (daemon?). Depending on how you exit, this will auto-launch iChat. Ive seen it happen many times on my machine. e.g. coming out of sleep.

Explicitly going offline before doing a quit seems the most reliable way of preventing this.

Hmmm...*neither* of these things is true for my installation. I get the agent without the show status in menu bar checked, and going offline before quitting doesn't prevent it from persisting.... Academic, natch, since I don't use iChat, but....

 

[alphaone]

I've had a similar experience, but only a couple of times. I haven't run iChat at all, and then while I'm usng Mail (of all things) it will suddenly appear - and I'll only find out when somebody IMs me and I both adium and ichat both inform me of the message. So, my point is, alphaone, are you using Mail when this happens and does anybody know if there might be alink between the two?

nope, i don't use mail. I use thunderbird.

 

[devman]

Hmmm...*neither* of these things is true for my installation. I get the agent without the show status in menu bar checked, and going offline before quitting doesn't prevent it from persisting.... Academic, natch, since I don't use iChat, but....

On the first part you are right. I'd assumed that setting was what caused the agent to run (as I thought I only noticed it the first time after changing that setting).

On the second part, I didn't mean to imply that going offline before quitting kills the agent. The agent is always running (for me at least). What I meant was that going offline before quitting seems to be the most reliable way of preventing iChat from launching itself without my asking it to.

 

[devman]

nope, i don't use mail. I use thunderbird.

Hmm, but nbs2 had a good idea there. iChatAgent is the proess that broadcasts that you are online, sends your buddy icon to the server, sends the alerts to you, etc. Mail.app does have presence awareness for iChat so it's reasonable to speculate that iChatAgent is involved with that too. I know for example, that sometimes killing iChatAgent is the only way to get iChat to realise you're no longer in session (e.g. when an audio chat dies prematurely).

Doesn't answer your question I know - other than to say I'm sure iChatAgent is what's doing it.

 

[mkrishnan]

On the first part you are right. I'd assumed that setting was what caused the agent to run (as I thought I only noticed it the first time after changing that setting).

On the second part, I didn't mean to imply that going offline before quitting kills the agent. The agent is always running (for me at least). What I meant was that going offline before quitting seems to be the most reliable way of preventing iChat from launching itself without my asking it to.

So you're saying the agent is not solely an agent of evil, but can also be an agent of good if you make nice to it? And sorry, I didn't mean to imply that you implied anything...this is confuddling.

It makes me kind sad actually. Getting away from all these agents and monitors that programs install on Windows, that keep popping up at irritating times and annoying me. When I got Panther, I had none of these. Then iCal added one. Then iTunes. Then Sidetrack. And iChat, if I used it.... I like it better how iPhoto manages to be integrated without an agent. It'd be nice if these features were rolled into the OS's sort of central gateway for passing events to programs...whatever it uses to launch iPhoto at the appropriate time, and to send mail requests to Mail and web requests to your browser. And it should have a PREFERENCE PANE, whatever it is.

 

[Mechcozmo]

When I got Panther, I had none of these. Then iCal added one. Then iTunes. Then Sidetrack. And iChat, if I used it.... I like it better how iPhoto manages to be integrated without an agent. It'd be nice if these features were rolled into the OS's sort of central gateway for passing events to programs...whatever it uses to launch iPhoto at the appropriate time, and to send mail requests to Mail and web requests to your browser. And it should have a PREFERENCE PANE, whatever it is.

I agree. I don't like these daemons that suck my processing power. But I think you should check out iScroll 2. Very nice instead of Sidetrack. Its daemon doesn't show up in the top 10 list of processes usually.

Linkety to iScroll 2. It allows you to use the two-finger scrolling like on the new PowerBooks but it will work with most AlBooks and most iBook G4s.