VoIP features expected in Apple's Leopard - Page 2

Well, the main difference I can think of is that if it's really VoIP, the government will probably want to tax and regulate it.

I wonder if the idea is some kind of .Mac-like subscription service? If so, I'll pass thanks.

SIP! SIP! SIP!

??? I was just able to send a message to my cell phone and got back a reply. -- I don't have the phone set up to send messages so I didn't test iChats' ability to receive unannounced messages. (iChat 3.1.4/Tracfone)

Well, in my opinion the IM world is a divided mess of non-interoperable proprietary systems.
I have a hard time believing this fact will change soon. That is a shame because it holds IM back from becoming a mature communications platform like email or phone.
Worse than that: the very same is happening in the VoIP world. AS all these companies are connecting to the regular phonesystem but not to each other, this is actually splitting up the good old phone systems!

I fear there is no solution that apple can do against this besides introducing a system that is:
a. way better
b. completely non-proprietary

Oh yes please, I thing google tries to embrase atleast some standards and is bringing support for SIP. That would be the only wise way to go. What comes to IM, I really don't get why ICQ lost, they were the first and best ones and they invented all the good stuff. If I want to find someone/have lost my UIN# I go to ICQ.com and they can all be found there, but I never realized how on earth can you know that your friends MSN id is floverpower5886597745 @ hotmail.com? And don't even get me started with offline messages, so simple but still others don't implement it. AIM uses variant from same OSCAR protocol as ICQ, so it should have at least some of the features. With IM it's the same as every other microsoft products because they come bundled people use them, they get the job done, but never are they the best out there in feature wise. Unfortunately market penetration is the only thing that counts.

As weir as it would be for you to use Europe Online, it will be for us here in Europe to use AMERICA online.

AIM is available in Europe but it's not as popular as MSN, probably because you have to download it from AOL and AOL isn't as popular in Europe as in America, even after they got rid of 'America' in the AOL brandname here.

Here's some stats...

"The MSN Messenger application has the strongest penetration worldwide, with 61 percent of worldwide IM users utilizing the application in February. MSN Messenger is also dominant in Latin America, reaching more than 90 percent of IM users, and in Europe and Asia Pacific, reaching more than 70 percent of IM users in each region. North America is the most competitive IM market, with MSN Messenger, AOL/Aim and Yahoo! Messenger each garnering between 27 percent and 37 percent of IM users in February."

http://www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?press=800

How did you do that ?

Gizmo will let you call other SIP providers networks although it's limited to using their own SIPPhone as a provider itself. You can't use it with a SIPGate or Vonage account for instance but you can dial them for free. The just added Asterisk support too so it's pretty good in an office environment. Fantastic software. Apple should get the Gizmo guys to fix iChat to use SIP.

X-Lite works with anyone but it's horrible, complex and doesn't often find it's way past firewalls.

Skype just works with itself. I think they're toast if they stick with that idea.

In the UK, many of the telecoms are really going for VoIP now. British Telecom are running adverts on TV for it and Orange are even giving away free VoIP routers, free calls to landlines and Orange mobiles off peak and free broadband.

I do hope Apple don't base a VoIP service on the USA and actually look outside at what's happening in Europe. The market is opening up here now so a closed VoIP service tied to .Mac would be stupid and nobody would use it.

More people use VoIP and IM in Europe than in America so they should take that on board. Knowing Apple though, they'll release a .Mac service that only works in the USA and gives you a US phone number that doesn't work with anyone else. \

Exactly what I'm afraid of.
We need open standards here to be generally accepted before VoIP will really take on as a communication solution people can rely on to 'just work' (tm)

ah harald -- always worth listening to what he has to say

How would you pronounce that ? "

"Oh-essexy " ?

Initiate a new chat and for the screenname, enter their cell number like this "+19195551234" (don't forget the 'plus'). Then type a message and bam.

Make sure you initiate the chat by going to:

File -> New chat with person

Of course it ONLY works in the US.

Yeah. It's known as AOL still, but they don't make a big deal about what it stands for.

I have an AIM account... but I use it with Adium and have a whole 2 contacts on it! It is correct that everyone uses MSN.

Sounds like feature creep to me. Is there ANYTHING that won't be rolled into the OS? I always think of the OS as PRIMARILY providing file management, memory management, task/application management, and I suppose peripheral device management; not GPS, VOIP, word processing, dish washing, etc., etc. I really have to think that one of the things strangling Vista is the HUGE number of "features" MS is rolling in - and then enabling and disabling the features for the various configurations of the OS.

Maybe I'm just living in the past and today's model is to tie the OS into as much as possible, and roll as many things into the OS as possible because a) it gives you bragging rights over the competition and b) it provides a system-wide framework for accessing all those features.

- Jasen.

Why is Europe just giving the race away to MSN? There is more a chance it will become interoperable if they are close. If one is a clear leader (especially Microsoft) they won't ever share with anyone else.


Apple's history so far seems to understand this. It doesn't seem they would integrate Mapping and GPS right into the OS itself. Safari, Mail, iChat, iCal, Address Book, etc are applications and not integrated into the OS.

But it would be great if Apple introduced Map and GPS applications that came with the OS.

Uhh,, because we like it?
well I guess that it's actually because no other IM client was really pushed here in Europe. Hotmail just came with messenger and soon everybody was using it.
But right now google chat is growing: it's hitchhiking on the succes of gmail now it is integrated into the gmail interface.
I actually quite like it's minimalist style.

Because it comes free with Windows and most people don't like 'America' On-Line in Europe. On Windows, it also does a heck more stuff than AIM does too or MSN on the Mac as well for that matter.

Just wanted to point out to everyone that you can use Google talk, i.e. gmail chat with iChat. Google talk uses the XMPP/Jabber protocol. See this link:

http://www.google.com/support/talk/b...y?answer=24076

It's not MSN but hopefully it'll cheer up all you Europeans out there who can't use iChat...

8)


UPDATE:

It appears it is also possible to connect to msn users using jabber once you have an account (e.g. if you have a google talk account). Check out this wiki article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jabber

Look down at the bottom in the Jabber ID section. I don't have time to try this out today or tomorrow, perhaps someone could try it out and let us know how it works....

Hopefully Apple will do for VOIP what it did for music and make an easy to use, slick software package. And to get said software mass distributed all they need to do is bundle it into the iTunes downloads. Then they can add the iPhone Wireless when the GSM phone is ready.

Thereby giving many Windows users even more reason to hate Apple.

Bundling is teh evil.

It's not a matter of can't, more a matter of won't.

I got the impression from the other posts that the reason you won't (use iChat) is because you can't (use MSN with it). Hence, the solution (maybe) that I posted. Like I said, I don't have time to test it right now (although I have tested Google talk and can confirm that it works and is very easy to set up).

If you have some other reason why you "won't" use the wonderful iChat, than excuuuuse me for trying to help.

I've accessed MSN with iChat before. It works. Not sure about the filesharing, though.

It doesn't. iChat does not support MSN's protocols.

No, but it supports Jabber, which can do MSN gateways.

No, I DO use iChat. However, generally, the only other people I know that I can chat with using it are also on Macs using iChat and most of them also use Gizmo now so we tend not to use iChat at all. PC users in Europe tend to stick with MSN. Almost nobody uses AIM. I don't know of a single PC user with an AIM account.

So, that means I can't talk to the vast majority of IM users in Europe because there is no interoperability between AIM and MSN.


Unless they've changed it recently, Google's jabber server doesn't allow you to talk to anyone that does not have a gmail account. ie. it won't talk to other jabberd servers on the net. They don't have an MSN or AIM gateway installed on their server either so you can't talk from gtalk to MSN.

Google dropped a bollock on that one, picking an open standard and then running their own isolated service with no gateways so negating the reason jabber is useful in the first place.

Plus, when people talk about MSN, they generally mean the whole chatroom, filesharing, video and audio shebang, not just text messages.



As I said, I do. It's more that OTHER PEOPLE won't for various reasons (political distrust of anything American, features, AIM adverts or laziness) so it's mostly pointless me using it. It's about as useful as Sherlock is in Europe.

Instant Messaging is a mess. What it needs is for MSN, AIM, Yahoo, Apple and Google to all use the XMPP jabber protocols and allow people to offer jabberd servers like we do with email servers now. The centralised approach is plain stupid. Imagine if all mail had to go through hotmail or gmail and you weren't allowed to mail from one to the other! Apple and Google support jabber in varying degrees, including Apple shipping jabberd in OSX Server and supporting it in iChat, but until Microsoft in particular stops trying to protect it's ecosystem it's nothing more than a gesture. Maybe if Google sets up to beat MSN with features instead of it's minimalist gtalk client, things will change.

Unless I've missed something doesn't this happen anyway? I'm trying to get hotmail & yahoo mail to play nicely with OSX Mail and it's not pretty.

This whole internet 'openness' thing was always a red rag to a bull & Apple are guilty (if a little smaller) than the rest. McD

No.

No?

Of course the emails are standard and the servers freely exchange them but free client access to them isn't standard so their ecosystems are still preserved. Whether the protocol incompatibility lies server to server or server to client it has the same effect to the user - restricted choice of client. I can't use iChat for all my IM and I can't use OS X Mail client to manage all my emails.

Unless it's just me who can't access them with the OSX Mail client in which case, help! (& forget the httpmail plugin, it doesn't work with my MSN accounts)

McD

But there's nothing stopping you using another mail client and server yet still sending emails to users of that system, so their ecosystems are not still preserved. Not in the way IM is closed.

Adding 2+2 and probably getting 5.

1) The rumor is that VoIP is coming to OS X10.5 in some form.
2) The dominant VoIP technology, like it or not is Skype. Personally I like.
3) Skype seem to have been inexplicably slow moving toward a video implementation of the Skype client for Mac. Perhaps because they are waiting for something.
4) Judging by my personal experience and reading the Apple forums. - iChat is lousy at going through firewalls. Skype technology has this problem solved.
5) Apple should offer a good PC<->Mac videoconferencing solution.

My conclusion...
10.5 will ship with an officially sancitioned version of the Skype client for Mac. Developed by Apple with Skype's blessing. iChat 4.0 will include the old AOL client. Jabber and Skype.

It'd be a win for Skype - bringing new customers and losing the expense of developing for the Mac platform.
It'd be a win for Apple, because iChat would finally do what it is supposed to do. As well as provide Apple users with cheap International calls etc.

C.

Althought that would be nice it is not going to happen this way. Why? there is already a leaked skype 2 with video for mac going around the net (highly unstable, do not use).

It's not the dominant VoIP technology, far from it. The leader is MSN.

Skype is only leading in the realm of Internet to POTS integration and even there it's days are numbered with all the telecom companies adopting SIP.

As I understand it, the leaked Mac client is quite old. And despite users clamouring for a beta of 2.0 - it has not happened. In the past, Skype have been getting Mac versions out almost monthly. That has mysteriously stopped. Perhaps EBay have said, don't focus on the Mac version, save some money. But given that Skype is awash with Ebay cash - that does not make much sense.

It seems to me that Skype's mac team are waiting for something.

C.

(I can't see Apple adopting MSN)

Are Skype's days numbered, perhaps, perhaps not.

Skype remains a uniquely effective communications tool.
It's robust, it's easy to use, it "just works", it saves users actual money, it goes through firewalls "like butter (TM)" and it is truly cross platform.

iChat remains stubbornly useless. - requiring optimal network / software / settings configuration to work. In terms of the user experience, iChat is still not fit to be an Apple product. But when it works, it does do nice video

It might be entirely wishful thinking - but the bastard offspring of iChat and Skype would be something good enough to actually justify putting an iSight into every Mac.

c.

Neither can I. However, that doesn't take away from the fact it has 61% of the market worldwide. 90% in some markets. If you want interoperability then that's who you have to work with.


It's not unique at all. Gizmo does all of the above, is cheaper and uses industry standard SIP for it's comms so you can talk to other networks for free. Skype doesn't.

Skype is also barred from many corporate networks because of it's p2p networking technology.

Gizmo on the other hand just added Asterisk support so it even works with your corporate PBX.


IME, all it needs to get past firewalls is a decent CONE NAT router. If you've got one of the routers that don't do NAT well though, it's less than good. I disagree on the user experience. Apart from the NAT traversal problems with some cheesy routers, it's pretty slick. Far slicker than Skype, AIM, Gizmo particularly for file transfers.



The bastard offspring of iChat and Gizmo would be my choice although just changing it to use XMPP as it's protocol or getting SIP/STUN to work properly would be great. The problem is, iChat implemented it's init protocol before there was a standard. Now there is, they're gonna have problems merging old and new.

Totally correct!!! In Mexico and Latin America everyone, and I mean everyone uses MSN Messenger. It's funny every time I read that AIM is the most popular. In Mexico and Latin America MSN Messenger is all they know. Maybe AIM is the most popular in the US only.

I'm hoping the new Yahoo Messenger beta for the Mac that was just released a few days ago will change that. It looks pretty nice and the next beta will let users chat (text and voice) with MSN Messenger contacts. I still would like to be able to use my webcam with MSN contacts. Microsoft needs to do to MSN Messenger for the Mac what Yahoo did for Yahoo Messenger for the Mac in the last beta.

It also seems that the new Yahoo Messenger will have Yahoo Phone In and Yahoo Phone Out which are equivalent to Skype In and Skype Out.

I want those two services available for iChat. Basically because iChat does not have much echo when using the built-in mic and speakers. With Skype I have to use a headset.