by Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Who said that? Let me scroll back in Messages to find the exact person. (Ah, yes, George Santayana.)
One of iChat’s nicest features was the way it allowed you to sift through the transcripts of past chats; you always had a record of the promises you made for work (or in the rest of life). Although the new Messages app in Mountain Lion doesn’t do away with transcripts, it repackages the feature in a way that many iChat veterans find obscure.
The key difference is embedded in the Messages interface: Chats are no longer things that live in their own tabbed pop-up windows. Instead, the app organizes conversations in the main Messages window: In that window (the one labeled Messages), chats appear in a conversation sidebar on the left. Entries in this list represent both active chats with a contact (across all the services they may use) and the historical record of those chats, if you’ve chosen to store it.
In iChat, you could set an option to save a transcript for every chat; that option is preserved but relocated in Messages. Under Messages > Preferences in the General view, check Save history when conversations are closed. If this option remains unchecked—its default setting—no transcripts are saved. Check it, and the app writes all conversations to disk. (If the option is unchecked, quitting the program doesn’t delete all record of a current conversation. But that record will be deleted when you close a conversation using the X button that appears when you hover over it with your pointer, or when a conversation is selected and you choose File > Close Conversation.)
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