For most of us who use Mac, iChat is definitely our daily communication tool via text or video. My favorite thing about iChat is that I am able to connect to another iChat user from almost anywhere: Starbucks. Airport. Office. The firewall worries does not exist in my head when using the service.
The most common question people ask me: “What is the big difference between Leopard and Snow Leopard?” My first answer is often regarding iChat because of difference in resolution and bandwidth requirement which is essential to my daily video communication.
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Leopard (10.5) Resolution: 320 x 240 Speed: 900+ kbps |
Snow Leopard (10.6) Resolution: 640 x 480 Speed: 300+ kbps |
While on the subject of iChat, I wanted to point out one thing that most people do not know about, which has surprised me, is the ability to access iChat Theater or easy file transferring.
iChat Theater is really awesome. Without transferring any files, you can share your Keynote presentation or show a movie clip through iChat Theater. For instance with a Quicktime Movie file, just drag-and-drop over the face of the person you’re chatting with and you’ll get two options: Send to… and iChat Theater.
Put the file over “iChat Theater” and play the movie. You can watch the reaction of the person viewing the film. Or if you’re a salesperson, you definitely can use Keynote to deliver your sales pitch.
There’s a lot more to iChat and I encourage you to visit everything in Preferences and all menu items to discover its power.
UPDATE: Watch iChat Theater in action.
Feb 4, 2010@Adam Stone: Yea, thanks for bringing up iChat recording feature (http://www.deafmac.org/blog/?p=310).
http://www.ecamm.com has a video recording application and I have never given this a try.
Feb 4, 2010Chad,
Good entry.
Adam,
No worries about the caveat. Apple will require 10.5 or better soon in order to use anything. Few years from now I believe 0.1 will is the maximum version differential in order to use anything Mac. Business as usual. Cost shouldn’t be an issue. Mac users should faithfully budget for updates. Mattresses and the like used for stashing dollars and coins used to purchase updates.
:)
Feb 5, 2010And, not to mention the amazing “screen sharing” feature! It’s really cool to enter and control someone’s Mac and vice versa, from a distance, especially for tutoring, repairing, etc.
Power to Mac.
Feb 5, 2010If you ever want to test the video conferencing on your iChat without bothering your family/friends online. You can try 3 different BOT screen names:
appleu3test01
appleu3test02
appleu3test03
Add them on your iChat buddy list and you can invite them for video conferencing anytime only if they are online. Once you’re connected, you’ll see “I’m Mac and I”m PC” tv ads playing. Cool, isn’t it? This is also a great method to test your iChat “Connection Doctor” (Network Statistics) whenever you needed to.
Cheers,
Matt
Feb 5, 2010Matt
I test really cool. Test #1 is still off line. Thank you for sharing. I will keep it my buddy list to show many deaf friends to temper buy Macbook Pro. Go Mac!
Mar 3, 2010Right-click in text box will give you few options like import image from camera or scanner. capture full screen or selected screen (Grab.app will be launched)
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9:12 pm
iChat also has the ability to record your video chat. For people who are doing sign language research, this is a godsend. I can record sign language samples and analyze them later, all while using the same video chat program I’m already used to! The only caveat is that the other person needs to be also using 10.5 or better.
What other useful applications are out there for videochat recording?