July 08, 2003

iSight / iChatAV / WWDC 2003


After being back home from WWDC and having the "Reality Distortion Field" slowly fade on me, i thought i had to comment on BBum's blog on iChatAV and the iSight:

Sure it was nice of Steve to give an iSight to each of us. Damn nice piece of hardware for sure. Much appreciated!

However, calling iChatAV "revolutionary" as lots of us Mac aficionados do, is - well - biased.

Being the first WWDC with an "Enterprise" track, here's what an "Enterprise" user like me feels is missing from iChatAV:

  • NetMeeting compatibility since this would also make it compatible with our professional video-conferencing system.
  • One To Many Conferences, since most of the time, a conference is really involving more than 2 persons.
  • Integrated whiteboard and screensharing in order to show others presentations and such.

Now all this isn't new and even exists on the Mac Today (more or less mature). For instance there is a promising looking video-conf App, which indeed is NetMeeting compatible, called ohphoneX.

Even a real interactive conferencing app incl. whiteboard and such is there. Never heard about it before i met the Developers on one of the couches at WWDC: Marratech.

To sum up: iChatAV is a nice start and i enjoy being able to chat with my Girlfriend here in Germany while attending WWDCs, but there's potential for much, much more...

Posted in: , , by seiz | Comments (3)

Comments

1

Was it not the machintosh platform that introduced the world to PC video conferencing with ICYouUSeeMe?

Posted by: Declan | November 4, 2003 4:35 PM

2

Surely agree to this - was just today TALKING in real time from Bali to Koh Samui (Thailand), both places with very high telephone charges and pretty bad internet connection - nevertheless it was easy even with a non tech guy to install program and make it work.

Posted by: Lambert | July 26, 2003 12:50 AM

3

Actually, I agree with you completely. You might have missed this quote from my posting: "Sure, video conferencing has been available for a long time and I have used a number of solutions. But nothing compares when it comes to ease of use (click on video icon) or cost (cost of broadband at both ends)."

I should have expanded that a bit to mention multipoint conferences, etc.

The point was more that iChat AV is the first solution that isn't a pain in the ass and or prohibitively expensive....

Posted by: bbum | July 8, 2003 6:10 PM

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