How to fix Charla’s input box

Charla, the wondeful open source application for chatting on Yahoo has an annoying problem – When you launch Charla, the text cursor is not defaulted to being in the chat input box. This means you have to click in the box, which is annoying.

However, Charla was written in Cocoa, so if you have the Apple Developer Tools, there is an easy fix:

  1. Quit Charla
  2. ctrl-click on the Charla application icon and choose “Show Package Contents”
  3. Open the Contents folder
  4. Open the resources folder
  5. Double click on the file ‘MainMenu.nib’
  6. Double click “Chat Window’ in the ‘MainMenu.nib’ window to open the Charla window
  7. ctrl-drag from the “Chat Window” icon to the text input box. The input box will hilite with a blue border
  8. In the NSWindow Info panel that opens, select ‘initialFirstResponder’ and click ‘Connect’
  9. Choose Save from the File menu and quit Interface Builder

Now launch Charla and note that the text cursor is already blinking in the text input box!

Click here for an image to help you out.