Versions of iChat before 3.0 (the version that ships with Tiger) were shy of perfect by one essential feature: iChat lacked any way to automatically respond to messages it received and thus did not conform to the "away message" protocol that the rest of the instant messaging world has come to respect.

iCAR, the iChat Auto-Reply, solved this. It added a basic auto-reply function to iChat. It made iChat perfect.

With Tiger's advent, Apple has patched this hole and made iChat perfect of its own volition. Now iCAR must fill a new and definitionally challenging role: it must make iChat better than perfect.

iCAR is a plugin for iChat that implements an advanced auto-reply function. Replies may be sent after every message received, after only the first one from each buddy, or only if a certain time interval has elapsed. They may be sent when you are available or idle, not only when you have set yourself as "away". Furthermore, the content of an iCAR auto-reply is not limited to your iChat status: it may be entered manually, selected randomly, or even generated dynamically by an AppleScript or a Unix command.

See if you don't agree with us: better than perfect.

iCAR is released under the GNU General Public License.

• Download iCAR 0.8.1 as a disk image from SourceForge (228k).
• Download the source code as a bzip2ed tarball from SourceForge (122k).

The current version of iCAR is only compatible with iChat 3.0 and Mac OS X v10.4 (Tiger). The last version compatible with iChat 2.x, which shipped with Mac OS X v10.3 (Panther) and could be purchased for Mac OS X v10.2 (Jaguar), is iCAR 0.7b2. The latest version compatible with iChat 1.x, which shipped with Jaguar, is iCAR 0.4.

For more previous versions, see the SourceForge files page.