The iChat Experience
I know this is probably going to banish me to the hellish abyss of mac-geek-dom but I feel compelled to do it. It is just wrong not to.
Just had my very first multi-person video conferencing session using iChat with some friends. The session got triggered because one of us has just gotten his hands on a brand new 24-inch iMac and the rest just simply wanted to try using iChat with multiple parties.
The screenshot above is courtesy of Gurmit. It was taken right off from his iChat application on his macbook and it is as authentic as it can be. The layout of the participants in the chat is just sweet, feels as though they are just right infront of you.
Video conferencing is nothing groundbreaking given the technology that we have today but yet I am still amazed at the ease of it through iChat.
The quality of the audio and video is really quite impressive and the software is actually smart enough to lower video quality in favour of audio data-rate. This ensures that the audio will still be fairly reasonable when the bandwidth is limited. In this case, It does make sense to prioritize audio over video, what good would it be if you could see the other party clearly but not hear a single word.
Overall, it is a rather amazing and pleasant episode for us. Yet another good reason to get a Mac.
Damien
Wow