TechTV Chat

I'm still trying to figure out how to use TechTV chat with Mac OS X. There's something about OS X Java that chat doesn't like. As usual, the world caters to Windows users instead of adhering to standards which would ensure things work for everyone. Grumble, grumble. "Dual Athlon" Dave Plotts has taken the lead on figuring out how to get cross-platform Jabber clients working with the TechTV chat. You can read the results of his research on the Leoville message boards. He says several TechTV chat hosts are using JabberFox successfully with OS X. I had all sorts of problems with it on Friday night. The binary wouldn't download, and when I built it from the source code (which requires the Cocoa developer tools) it wouldn't log in. According to Dave's most recent posts, you have to either log-in first with the Java client, or have TechTV's Interact folks do some voodoo for you. THEN, and only then, the Jabber client will work. I'll try again on tonight's show with both JabberFox and Fire. It would be so great to be able to use a real chat client to communicate with viewers during the show.