iChat AV Beta and iSight
The long-awaited iChat upgrade adds both audio and video chats to iChat's abilities -- allowing users to communicate with friends and family over long distances. The sofware supports Apple's new iSight video camera which provides 640x480 Full Motion video at up to 30 Frames Per Second.
The camera also has a microphone and interfaces to your Macintosh via Firewire.
The public Beta of iChat AV is available now. The final iChat version which supports Jaguar will be sold for $29.95. Users upgrade to Panther, however, will get the final iChat AV version included.
The first solid info that the next version of iChat would support video conferencing came in February, 2003. Previous hints were made by Steve Jobs himself. Later hints at a communication device are felt to be preditive of this product. Further details were uncovered by ThinkSecret, and then quickly pulled by Apple's Legal department.
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Do you know whether the video is compatible with the windows version of aol messenger?
:D
When they get to this, wonder how much it will cost.
Configuring the mid level machine with just a few things: faster video card, etc. brought the box to over $2800.
Not cheap but then again, it's the fastest in the world.
Hardly efficient and intuitive. What happened to the often-touted Toolbar feature of Cocoa (and partially available in Carbon in Jaguar and newer)?
Why can't I get the name of the chat room in the chat room window instead of the first person's name? How am I supposed to know which window is which?
And what's with the half-implementation of Groups in the buddy list? AOL's AIM does it much better.
I guess if you want to play Truth or Dare with some chick you met on AIM get the new iChat. Otherwise its a huge step backwards in ease of use of the original text-chat features and forsakes a whole lot of Apple's own UI features in the Mac OS X releases.
Have any of the leads on iChat actually used ICQ/IRC/AIM before or are they all baby-boomers who read the spec and went in totally blind? Yuck.
iChat 2.0 Preview Alpha/Beta/Whatever - PASS for now.
edit: I decided to just try it, and yes, it replaces the old iChat
but right now i'm loving it. i never used the toolbar features that were in the IM windows.
some pros to ichat AV (aside from the AV part)
-click your buddy icon, it remembers past buddy icons that you have used!
-automatic resizes of the type-box instead of the one-line only
-groups...sure they need some work, but it's nice to have! now i can keep people i rarely talk to on and still keep my buddy list slimmed down as to not take up too much space.
-show and hide buddy icons (from the view menu) a la adium anyone?
-appears that the ichat to ichat away message bug is finally fixed
-and a few more nice features...
cons:
-still no profiles
-features hard to access
-multi-IM client support
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