iChat in Leopard: the definitive thread
I was sure there'd be a "new iChat" thread already, but I couldn't find one, so here goes. If mods have seen such a thread around then please move the following to the right address. 
Screen sharing: I'd pay half the price of Leopard for this alone. Now I'll be able to help computer illiterate relatives remotely hundreds of miles away. Most of their problems will be gone just like that.
Also, with presentation mode, when I want to show them something they'll no longer take anywhere between twenty seconds to a minute to save a file on the desktop, browse to the right part, open and close. I can just show the thing period.
Effects? Yawn..
Chat recording? Great!
But wait... "Before recording starts, iChat notifies your buddies and asks for their permission to record." My irc client doesn't ask everyone whether I can log private chat or not. Why does iChat? If I can see the picture or hear the sound, I can always record it. Everyone remotely used to dealing with technology knows this. Some people don't. At best iChat's confirmation for recording can give them an illusion that what they say and show won't be recorded. If Apple wants to make this a two-way function, a recording indicator with no dialog - like the light on iSight - would be polite and unintrusive, and protect just as well (not at all) against someone determined to record clandestinely.
What I want to do is to record everything automatically. It means I'd never have to e.g. take notes. It also means I'd have an archive of communication to refer to in the future for information. But to be really useful it needs to work without me needing to remember to activate it, without needing to specify where the recording will be placed, or the other party having to click on additional dialogs every time they contact me or vice versa. Neither the kind of recording indicator I suggested or a complete lack of indication would be a problem for me. I realize there are places where two-party consent is absolutely required by law; that cannot be Apple's problem if they do not cause people to inadvertentely record something by e.g. making recording the default.
I seriously hope there'll be an option (fat chance), an unofficial command line setting, or a hack. Otherwise a very useful feature turns into a mere shadow of itself as far as I'm concerned.
Screen sharing: I'd pay half the price of Leopard for this alone. Now I'll be able to help computer illiterate relatives remotely hundreds of miles away. Most of their problems will be gone just like that.
Also, with presentation mode, when I want to show them something they'll no longer take anywhere between twenty seconds to a minute to save a file on the desktop, browse to the right part, open and close. I can just show the thing period.
Effects? Yawn..
Chat recording? Great!
But wait... "Before recording starts, iChat notifies your buddies and asks for their permission to record." My irc client doesn't ask everyone whether I can log private chat or not. Why does iChat? If I can see the picture or hear the sound, I can always record it. Everyone remotely used to dealing with technology knows this. Some people don't. At best iChat's confirmation for recording can give them an illusion that what they say and show won't be recorded. If Apple wants to make this a two-way function, a recording indicator with no dialog - like the light on iSight - would be polite and unintrusive, and protect just as well (not at all) against someone determined to record clandestinely.
What I want to do is to record everything automatically. It means I'd never have to e.g. take notes. It also means I'd have an archive of communication to refer to in the future for information. But to be really useful it needs to work without me needing to remember to activate it, without needing to specify where the recording will be placed, or the other party having to click on additional dialogs every time they contact me or vice versa. Neither the kind of recording indicator I suggested or a complete lack of indication would be a problem for me. I realize there are places where two-party consent is absolutely required by law; that cannot be Apple's problem if they do not cause people to inadvertentely record something by e.g. making recording the default.
I seriously hope there'll be an option (fat chance), an unofficial command line setting, or a hack. Otherwise a very useful feature turns into a mere shadow of itself as far as I'm concerned.
Comments
(You don't have to sign up for .Mac to use iChat.)
But yes, audio/video chat via iChat is flakey as hell. Amazingly, it actually got worse in 10.4. (Well documented connectivity issues)
Hopefully they've resolved these issues in 10.5.
(You don't have to sign up for .Mac to use iChat.)
But yes, audio/video chat via iChat is flakey as hell. Amazingly, it actually got worse in 10.4. (Well documented connectivity issues)
Hopefully they've resolved these issues in 10.5.
I know but my brother in law and I did to try out iChat. I figured that it should work fine under .Mac. We never could establish a connection. Finally we gave up.
I think my brother in law decided to keep .Mac but I didn't after the trial period. I would keep .Mac if the email service was better. Seems like a lot of users complain of outages and periods when they cannot access their mail.
The worst limitation is that I can't reach most of my friends. They aren't on the AIM network, which I think consists of mostly US folk. Over here MSN is the most popular nowadays.
Gon and/or dfiler do you have .Mac? If so do you like, recommend, it?
My main beef is that I prefer to have my own data under my own control, and do not like subscription pricing, especially for the kind of stuff you eventually grow to depend on. Could buy some sort of software package with one-time cost that did most of the same stuff and assumed you have a server.
Otherwise, it looks fairly good. Especially for people who are willing to be significant contributors to Internet without necessarily understanding much of the technology that makes it happen, people who already use and trust iLife a lot, and those with multiple Macs geographically apart. If you don't have any kind of backup and .Mac is the only way you'll bother to make one, then it'll be a great investment.
I don't have it.
My main beef is that I prefer to have my own data under my own control, and do not like subscription pricing, especially for the kind of stuff you eventually grow to depend on. Could buy some sort of software package with one-time cost that did most of the same stuff and assumed you have a server.
Otherwise, it looks fairly good. Especially for people who are willing to be significant contributors to Internet without necessarily understanding much of the technology that makes it happen, people who already use and trust iLife a lot, and those with multiple Macs geographically apart. If you don't have any kind of backup and .Mac is the only way you'll bother to make one, then it'll be a great investment.
See when I analyze .Mac it really doesn't make sense for me either. I back up using superduper. I don't have multiple macs (yet) to sync.
I don't use iWeb although that could change in the future. iChat is an appealing feature I could use with .Mac, but I can use iChat without it too.
Webmail is the most important feature of .mac for me and it's got mixed reviews from users the best I can tell so I'm waiting before switching over to it. If I ever decide too.
...they don't have a .Mac chat registration capability??? AIM, ICQ and Yahoo but no .Mac???
This is AppleInsider isn't it???
(1) Tabbed chats:
For me this feature is the best improvement over iChat in Tiger. Like the Finder, Mail, and the Open/Save dialogue boxes, tabbed-chats uses the familiar iTunes-esque interface. The application uses a pale-blue sidebar to organize multiple chats, like how the other applications I listed use that sidebar style to organize other data. This feature is just great if, like me, you feel unorganized with lots of separate chat windows all at once. I used to always get annoyed with how I would never know who IM'ed me but by using Exposé to look at each window. With tabbed-chats, you can see who IMs you instantly.
(2) Overall UI:
It's not terribly different than iChat in Tiger. The version in Leopard removes the brushed-metal in favor of consistency with the UI across the system. There's no window border on the left side. These are all minor changes to a basically familiar interface we've used in iChat for quite a while. Tabbed chats is the biggest interface change, but I thought that deserved its own recognition above.
How do I enable iChat's form of "tabbed" chatting? I can't figure it out!
They should have enabled it by default, in my opinion. Either way, you can set it up by going to Preferences > Messages and then checking Collect Chats Into A Single Window.