Adium is awesome! It can be overwhelming for the number of options it offers, but it?s a very complete system. The only drawback is if you use video chat often as you may find yourself jumping back to a standard IM client to use that.
Even thought Lion finally has a unified window for IM accounts, it?s still a window that I don?t need or want to see floating over the other windows so I?ll stick with Adium for this sort of optimization.
I love Adium, but since it has no video support, I only use it for Facebook Chat. I use aMSN for WLM and I use YM for YM.
I really wish YM supported animated GIF user pics like MSN does...
I am beginning to wonder about that as well. If Apple would just do that, so that any computer or mobile device can utilize the FaceTime protocol it would really take off as a new medium for people to communicate with. I could have sworn that when they released FaceTime to the world, they said it was based on Open Standards, and would be made open.
It's gone the way of AirPrint inside OS X. Quietly let go.
I'm definitely leaning toward it all running everything through Apple servers now.
I hadn't considered the security implications... but now that I think about it sending an email address to Apple's Facetime server and receiving the owners IP address back sounds kind of dodgy
The main problem I though was that at least one phone needs to be the server to make peer-to-peer work. It's far more likely that the Apple Facetime server is acting like the middle man handling the video/audio stream from both phones.
There isn't really a risk in returning your IP since actually you are returning the IP of your router & not your own. Even if your computer is directly connected to your ISP there is certainly no more risk to it than using web as any web server you visit can see your IP. Don't let your paranoia run away with you.
More likely would be the need to have laws in place that will protect against telemarketers, or allowing you to set things like automatically blocking people not on your contact list. I doubt you will see malicious people calling you by way of video phone since crooks typically don't like to be seen. It's been out there long enough now on the Mac platform & iOS devices that issues like these should have started appearing if they were a real issue, and these are issues already that have popped up on occasion with Skype & other IM services so nothing new here.
By the way, in the Firewall settings on your Mac you can enable Stealth mode, this blocks icmp echo replies from your Mac. So even if they find your IP, when they do a standard scan of it the results will return host down. You can scan a host regardless but most people looking to be malicious don't get that far, they aren't going to waste their time on a machine they can't verify is up.
@ MacAdam212.. "While I like this feature of FaceTime, an Audio only option would be nice too,"
....there already is, sort of...once a FaceTime call is underway, you can "exit" the video part (put it on pause), by hitting the 'home' button. The video is put on hold, the voice part is still in session. You will see a green bar at the top of the home screen showing the call in session and you can go back to the video by tapping the green bar. You can also do other things (multitasking) while the video part is in pause mode.
Comments
I love aMSN...
Adium is awesome! It can be overwhelming for the number of options it offers, but it?s a very complete system. The only drawback is if you use video chat often as you may find yourself jumping back to a standard IM client to use that.
Even thought Lion finally has a unified window for IM accounts, it?s still a window that I don?t need or want to see floating over the other windows so I?ll stick with Adium for this sort of optimization.
I love Adium, but since it has no video support, I only use it for Facebook Chat. I use aMSN for WLM and I use YM for YM.
I really wish YM supported animated GIF user pics like MSN does...
I am beginning to wonder about that as well. If Apple would just do that, so that any computer or mobile device can utilize the FaceTime protocol it would really take off as a new medium for people to communicate with. I could have sworn that when they released FaceTime to the world, they said it was based on Open Standards, and would be made open.
It's gone the way of AirPrint inside OS X. Quietly let go.
I'm definitely leaning toward it all running everything through Apple servers now.
I hadn't considered the security implications... but now that I think about it sending an email address to Apple's Facetime server and receiving the owners IP address back sounds kind of dodgy
The main problem I though was that at least one phone needs to be the server to make peer-to-peer work. It's far more likely that the Apple Facetime server is acting like the middle man handling the video/audio stream from both phones.
There isn't really a risk in returning your IP since actually you are returning the IP of your router & not your own. Even if your computer is directly connected to your ISP there is certainly no more risk to it than using web as any web server you visit can see your IP. Don't let your paranoia run away with you.
More likely would be the need to have laws in place that will protect against telemarketers, or allowing you to set things like automatically blocking people not on your contact list. I doubt you will see malicious people calling you by way of video phone since crooks typically don't like to be seen. It's been out there long enough now on the Mac platform & iOS devices that issues like these should have started appearing if they were a real issue, and these are issues already that have popped up on occasion with Skype & other IM services so nothing new here.
By the way, in the Firewall settings on your Mac you can enable Stealth mode, this blocks icmp echo replies from your Mac. So even if they find your IP, when they do a standard scan of it the results will return host down. You can scan a host regardless but most people looking to be malicious don't get that far, they aren't going to waste their time on a machine they can't verify is up.
....there already is, sort of...once a FaceTime call is underway, you can "exit" the video part (put it on pause), by hitting the 'home' button. The video is put on hold, the voice part is still in session. You will see a green bar at the top of the home screen showing the call in session and you can go back to the video by tapping the green bar. You can also do other things (multitasking) while the video part is in pause mode.