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will it change diapers?

WebEx redux? Yawn...

Yeah and how many people know about Webex? Oh wait, it's Windows only. Duh!

Lets be real, the only way this will change anything is if they release iChat for Windows...

not " could change", WILL CHANGE!

Windows ... thats what I look out to see the sunrise

WebEx Redux?

Not hardly, iChat theater will actually work and be in the hands of Ma & Pa mere mortals. Not the exclusive domain of UberGeek

If iChat can be called from any app (and I assume iLife and Safari will be included), then visual and audio collaboration become easy. Work together on a GarageBand song or PodCast or edit a FCP movie from within the LAN or across the world. No need to make your documents multi-user - you all edit the one copy at once!

A loaf of bread, a container of milk, and a stick of butter.

Can iChat Theater remember that?

Redmond, start your copiers...again. This will turn some business heads for sure.

How about collaboration with Safari? Two people currently in different locations who will be buying airline tickets to travel together can see exactly what options they have. One person will be the "doer" -- goes to the travel website, enters the dates, etc. while the other one mainly watches (or makes audio suggestions such as changing the dates to make a longer vacation). Both see a list of flight options - different departure times, airlines, connection cities, etc. Then one person says, "how about the itinerary at the bottom of the screen?". The doer then goes to that itinerary and checks out further information such as seat availability or price. When the tickets are being purchased, the watcher might happen to have a text file of their frequent flier numbers. The file is opened in TextEdit, gets linked into the iChat connection, then the one controlling Safari and making the purchase can see the numbers (maybe even copy & paste?) for inputting into the reservation.

Same goes for picking a hotel or just browsing restaurant pages to determine where to eat.

At the same time, a live two-way video chat is taking place for additional communication cues (someone could give you a literal "thumbs up" when you scroll to something agreeable).

iChat used in this fashion could eliminate the need for anyone to be physically present to look over your shoulder as you collaboratively digest information and make decisions.

Um, yeah. It's called Timbuktu Pro.

Peter Leenhouts;

Yeah... but only because the people on the camera end of 'Doze boxes are ugly

Just wait...you never know...they could make a version for windblows. And if they do, it will be another gateway drug to the mac as iPod and BootCamp is now.

I can't wait for this to finally make it to the Mac. I have been wating for a solution like this since I first used NetMeeting on a Windows machine back in 1997.

Notice the low system requirements of 90 megahertz Pentium and Windows 95:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/NetMeeting/SystemRequirements/default.ASP

It wasn't very succesful, or maybe it got renamed, but I have looked for it on XP and I can't find it.

I don't know if anybody else did it first, but my first experience with this was with Windows. So, us Mac users are actually 10 or so years late to this party.

"Steve Ballmer says this isn't any good at all for business. Because it's not what business wants or needs."

The computing revolution is bypassing Redmond, that's for sure.

Vista ALREADY has live screen sharing.

So does Tiger... if you buy ARD.

"Just wait...you never know...they could make a version for windblows. And if they do, it will be another gateway drug to the mac as iPod and BootCamp is now."

Already exists on Windows, has done for years. you should know you Mac guys always get the "innovations" second.

Looking at the comment section on the original article shows two observations from the Windoze crowd:
1. They want it for Window, too, claiming "only 2% can use it."
I say, "And why should Apple help you stay on Windoze?"

2. They say, "M$ invented the idea with NetMeeting 10 years ago."
I say, "Bull. NetMeeting was really built on CUSeeMe and Timbuktu. Yet another M$ clone and co-opting of the good work of others."

And now, for your further amusement and edification, I offer, the one, the only, the Anagram of the day:
    GAMBLER STEAL

Unscramble the letters into two names that will scare you witless, will terrify your children, will horrify your coworkers... (Solution later.)

Why does Windows have to work with it. It's a Mac application.

I'm betting that iChat Theater will eliminate the need to punch holes in routers, and other techno-hurdles. I've played with all the screen sharing toys, Timbuktu, ARD, VNC, NetMeeting, and frankly the bigest problem is trying to tell a buddy how to configure a router or firewall to make it happen. Sure it works on my end, but my buddy doesn't know, and without screen sharing, I can't see what he's doing on his end to help him set it up. Chicken or egg? iChat will be a one click solution. Not to mention the backdrop feature, that's just neat-o.

Yawn,
"Already exists on Windows, has done for years. you should know you Mac guys always get the "innovations" second."

That's a typical Windows fanboy response, and it's why Microsoft is doomed. The innovation isn't in getting there first. It's in getting it right, first. Just about everything that can be done on a computer, has been done. Now, it's all about who lets the average user do it with the least amount of pain. Since Microsoft adds pain (cancel or allow) instead of removing it, they can't ever innovate.

STELLAR GAME

ballmer gates

hahaha.

STABLE BALMER

@ infomercial:

Netmeeting is still there in XP, you just have to find it. And it's always been a very effective collaborative tool and still works well today. I can't take that away from them.

But it sounds like this new version of iChat will be even better.

I think I'm gonna go buy some bandwidth futures....

timbucktu costs $90 a SEAT! That's $180 for it to do ANYTHING. its stupid expensive and they provide no cost reduction for upgrade paths....

its is crap.

@infomercial: Click Start, Run, type "conf". Ta da, NetMeeting.

Vista already has multi-party conferencing built in with "Meeting Space". I'm not a basher, I have three Macs but this is absolutely nothing new here.

Apple will start doing some of their tech support through iChat after Leopard is released.

For the Windoze boys here, you have been able to do web conferencing on BOTH Macs and PC's since webcams first came around. But, due to expense (sometimes just perceived) and technical difficulties, it has never been that popular outside the corporate world. iChat will make web conferencing drop-dead simple to do and will impress the average consumer out there. Show someone a video chat in iChat right now and they will most likely freak out because it's free and actually possible.

The idea is nothing new but making it easy and fast enough is hard. Screen sharing is free and has been for both platforms for some time. On mac many people think you need Remote Desktop but the client is built into the OS and all you need to view it is a free VNC viewer like Chicken of the VNC. The problem is that its too slow to useful. It sends a full resolution image of the desktop, a bitmap that must be several megabytes, causing it to lag on anything other than a gigabit ethernet connection. My parents and I both have 3MB DSL and its unusable. If Apple can make a solution that takes 10 seconds to set up and refreshes often enough that It actually helps me get something done I'll use it all the time.

@Jay. I agree. I've tried to use Chicken of the VNC to help my parents, but I've never been able to get it to work at any speed.

A fast and usable alternative from Apple would be welcome.

tmsruge..."Yeah and how many people know about Webex? Oh wait, it's Windows only. Duh!"

Webex isn't windows only....I participate and host meetings on a regular basis.

"Why does Windows have to work with it. It's a Mac application."

The application needs to be able to present to Win PCs in order to be useful for most people. It does not need a fully functional Win client, just a player that a windows user can download to be able to receive a presentation. This would make the application killer and must-have for many, many business people and families who have heterogenous computers.

An excellent Mac and PC-compatible screen sharing program is Bosco Screen Share (http://www.componentx.com/ScreenShare/). You still need to open a port on the receiving computer's firewall, but it's damn easy to use.

The one downside is, it's not been updated in about two years, so there's not Intel-native version.

No no no...stop teasing. It was one thing when we thought we'd have it by June, but now that it's delayed until October this is just torture!

Yes I'm looking forward to all the cool new features in Leopard, as well as updated versions of iLife and iWork (please please please let them be ready in October too). Hopefully the WWDC will have more juicy details for us. Like those top secret features Steve mentioned last year. But I wanna kind of forget about it until then.

Now some more rumors on what the iPhone's gonna have...that I wouldn't mind.

>"A loaf of bread, a container of milk, and a stick of butter."

I know where that came from...

All these comments about the availability of net conferencing apps for windows misses the point they are unused by most people in business because their implementations are so user unfriendly. Also their performance when "application sharing" is abysmal. iChat could change all that.

As one poster already said, it not who did it first, it's who gets it right first. Noone has yet gotten it right.

Exactly ShadowMac. It may exist on Windows, but if it's so poor no-one uses it, it may as well not exist.

There were plenty of MP3 players before iPod, plenty of online music stores before iTunes, plenty of phones before iPhone (OK so I'm assuming that one's a given too!) and now people might understand why we are ready to say the 'wow' for iChat Theatre.

Microsoft does the 'Oh?' (or perhaps the "Ouch') while Apple delivers the genuine 'Wow'.

Webex is a whole different ball game and it is mac compatible (at least a mac can control a PC remotely not visa-versa). I use it on a day-to-day basis - from my mac.

Webex is a superb product multi-faceted produce with it's whole separate, secure worldwide network. It which has saved our company thousands and it can't be replaced by iChat.

Btw - i don't work for webex

peace.

"Windows ... thats what I look out to see the sunrise"

Windows show you what you could be experiencing without wrapping yourself in the sensory magic of the real thing.

Does this sound like another Vista OSX comparison?

magic word - living

Once more, theatre is misspelled.

"In short, iChat Theater is a new feature that will allow the broadcast of, and collaboration on, just about anything we do on our Mac,"

In other words... make your own SteveNote!

hmmmm

iPhone runs on OS X
iChat theater is part of OS X
iPhone has camera on the front side

Could there be something to this ? ...

Altos,
I have been down that same thought process, too. Right now the bandwidth requirements on the cell service would be too much for video conferencing. Maybe the 3rd revision of the iPhone......

@Yawn

Yeah, except of course for things like, Excel, FileMaker, Built-in networking, A/V capability out of the box, black and white video instead of monochrome - out of the box, the first desktop computer to be able to manage more than one serial port simultaneously - out of the box, iTunes, iPod - and all of it's variants, a true pro-sumer fully developed front end UI for Unix, Plug-and-Play, et. al.

I know you know all of this already and are just kidding, but just in case another reader didn't get that I thought I'd mention it.

Cool, yes, but mind-blowing?? Come on. I have this feature now at work in Microsoft Office Communicator 2005.

I dislike MS as much as the next guy.. just sayin'

I've said this before. Since Apple came out with iChat AV 2, it stopped being able to use voice on iChat using a dial-up account. You can pile on as many new features as you want but if you need to have a fiber-optic line and the fastest Mac on the planet to get it to work correctly, forget it.

Just make it work for the rest of us. Is that too much to ask?

"@Yawn

"Yeah, except of course for things like, Excel"

OK,so the Apple II did have Visicalc first.

"FileMaker"

Not the first pc database application.

"Built-in networking"

So you're "First" if you put the technology in the same box rather than what "First" normally means, it being an upgrade which predates the Mac "First" by years?

"A/V capability out of the box"

See networking

"black and white video instead of monochrome"

See networking.

"first desktop computer to be able to manage more than one serial port simultaneously"

Any PC from day 1, also See networking

"iTunes"

a latecomer in media playing software.

"iPod"

Creative

fully developed front end UI for Unix

Sun, HP et al.

"Plug-and-Play"

PCs


See my point, you only THOUGHT all this stuff came first on an Apple machine.

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