Message balloon background colors

From your Messages menu > Preferences > Viewing.

Hi,

To explain further.

That Preference Section comes from the iChat side or Messages.

Currently you have to change the Background Colour to enable the ability to chat Fonts and then possibly colour the Font.

You can override the incoming choices as well.

However iMessages coming from iOS devices have no colour in the data being sent.

Only on the iOS do you get outgoing colours to denote how it was sent (SMS or iMessage)

Therefore for iOS you will see the "white"/"Clear" messages

As more people switch to Mavericks and do not make Font and background colour changes you will se an increase of the plain options.

Conversely those Mountain Lion users may well be taking a second look at the prefernces and changing things now.

10:04 pm Sunday; October 27, 2013

 iMac 2.5Ghz 5i 2011 (Mavericks 10.9)
 G4/1GhzDual MDD (Leopard 10.5.8)
 MacBookPro 2Gb (Snow Leopard 10.6.8)
 Mac OS X (10.6.8),
 Couple of iPhones and an iPad

My wife only has an iPhone (5S/iOS7), but her chat bubbles show up yellow in iMessage. A few others have different colors like a dark gray or purple. But I know they're not the type to change settings like that, or choose colors like purple.

Could there be another thing that sets colors based on something in their contact info? Something in a plist file?

HI,

These settings in the Preferences for the incoming stuff are the ones you need to look at:-

Just to restate first.

I changed my outgoing colour to that green.

I left the font as Black in text colour.

I chose Arial Black as I prefer the boldness of the text.

If my Buddies (AIM, Jabber or Yahoo) have the same Settings for the Incoming stuff as I do (Automatic) then my chosen colour shows up in their Chat with me.

They cna block my choices of Colour and Font style if they set Colours and Fonts here.

IF a Buddy is using an App that does not specify a colour or Font then the incoming messages tend to be randomised (Although there is alos a deliberate Random setting)

An iPhone does not send colour.

The colours seen on the iPhone depend if it is sending (or Receiving) iMessages or SMS.

So, AIM Buddies sending form the AIM app on PC will be in this Category of uncoloured chats.

As will Facebook Buddies posting from the Facebook page, same for GoogleTalk Buddies using their Web based Chat option on the Web Mail page.

There are also a number of Mac compatible Jabber apps and AIM clients that don't send coloured "Balloons" or the Background style you are using.

AS I have said iPhones don't send any colour or Font info in the Message/chats

Here is a pic of a Group Chats from some years ago where some are Chosen colours and some are random.

I hope this helps.

8:51 pm Wednesday; December 11, 2013

 iMac 2.5Ghz 5i 2011 (Mavericks 10.9)
 G4/1GhzDual MDD (Leopard 10.5.8)
 MacBookPro 2Gb (Snow Leopard 10.6.8)
 Mac OS X (10.6.8),
 Couple of iPhones and an iPad

I found another post that partially answered my question. If no color data is sent, iMessage might pick a random color. This is so it's easy to distinguish conversations. I like having different colors.

I guess what I'm looking for is a way to set color by conversation or have it try again when it gets an ugly yellow.

Hi,

As the picture of the group chat shows the colours are random if the person have not chosen a colour.

There is not way to make a chat "re-do" the colour of the balloons if you don't like them.

As my second picture shows you can override the incoming colours.

The problem with this is that all incoming chats and iMessages get coloured with a single colour.

7:31 pm Thursday; December 12, 2013

 iMac 2.5Ghz 5i 2011 (Mavericks 10.9)
 G4/1GhzDual MDD (Leopard 10.5.8)
 MacBookPro 2Gb (Snow Leopard 10.6.8)
 Mac OS X (10.6.8),
 Couple of iPhones and an iPad