Apple's iChat Deserves Applause

It is not that often that a software update exceeds your expectations, however, that is exactly what Apple’s new iChat 4.0 through their Leopard OS has done. Early on I gave Apple a hard time about how iChat seemed to be unimportant to them. With all that Apple was doing with multimedia back in the Tiger generation, iChat seemed pretty tame. The pieces were all there, time was right for an internal Jabber based communications solution and Apple’s QuickTime technology was ready to support A/V communication. Well Apple delivered that and more. The screen sharing, collaboration to 4 connections, flexible file sharing and maybe the critical feature that finally makes A/V computer-to-computer communication desirable; a voice algorithm that does not require headsets. Unfortunately this is only available on Apple computers running Leopard. But Apple’s new iChat is so good it justifies moving more rapidly to an all Apple campus. And it justifies campaigning for someone to build an A/V capable PC Jabber client; maybe Apple is working on this.

We are now promoting our iChat Jabber Server here at GFU, which means we have opened up the required firewall ports so that it works most everywhere for our account holders. Actually the problem connections now occur when trying to connect to a colleague at another university. I predict that Apple’s iChat will justify opening up the required ports similar to the web’s port 80. But for now we begin to take advantage of this tool. I point you to an excellent YouTube video, “Apple iChat and Student/Instructor Collaboration”, by artistatech that demos how iChat is changing campus communications.