IChat script to get open IMs

Question

A few days ago, I was on the road with my old PowerBook G4 which only runs Mac OS X 10.4.11. I got bored and wrote a script to set my iChat status to a list of people who I have IMs open and am conversing with. That script took advantage of the fact that each IM window is a separate window, and is named separately.
The problem with iChat on 10.5.x is that i prefer to keep my IMs in a single window. The problem with that is that I can no longer use the script I had written on the other computer. Is there a way for me to get a list of all the open IMs?

Answer 1

Give this a try. It should be able to handle chats that have multiple participants, but I'm unable to test it at the moment.
tell application "iChat"
set thePeople to {}
repeat with aChat in (text chats)
set tmpPeople to {}
repeat with aParticipant in (get participants of aChat)
set end of tmpPeople to full name of item 1 of aParticipant
end repeat
set end of thePeople to tmpPeople
end repeat
end tell
This will return a list of lists.... {{"Bob Smith"},{"Joe Blow","Frank Z"},{"screename4000"}}
You can take out the inner repeat to return a single list assuming you aren't in chats with multiple participants.