Resurrecting iChat audio and video conferencing(blog.pipetogrep.org) |
Resurrecting iChat audio and video conferencing(blog.pipetogrep.org) |
This is wonderful. I love that people are still using this!
I worked on iChat AV video. We also added 4-way video conferencing with H.264 support in 2004. Really did feel cutting edge back then. Lots of all-nighters in those days, hand-writing altivec and hand-optimizing h.264 to work on iMacs and iBooks that didn’t have simd..
I'm curious, would you be open to talking about your experience on a podcast with us? https://forkbombpodcast.com/ It's noncommercial, no ads, and is just for fun.
If not, I'd love to know more here. You all must of been really proud of what you built.
It might be a bit before I have time to do a podcast (and also there are many things I can’t talk about because of both the nature of Apple and also the legal mess that is the video field). Anything specific you want to hear more about?
Thank you for working on this. You added so much enjoyment to using AIM on an eMac circa that time. People talk fondly of their 90's/80's computing experience, but this was mine. It really was a magical time...
By that time, not only was Android looking much more competitive, but FaceTime evidently demonstrated to be a massive hit that became very powerful for Apple's branding.
I also read that FaceTime eventually went from P2P to centralized servers (maybe in response to the lawsuit?), which of course is antithetical to the premise of being open.
Lastly, just speculating, but I imagine Steve Jobs had to have been a strong advocate for making it an open standard, if not the driving force. It makes sense that the promise would have fizzled out by the time the lawsuit was over, a year after his death.
How many variants of the codecs did you have to implement to make it work?
https://github.com/maxbbraun/pisight
https://www.printables.com/model/418381-webcam-project-using...
The last straw for me was making the recents/contacts as confusing as it was, and I personally made some accidental calls to former contacts that for some reason were made front and center.
I expect the next version will hide even more controls behind a new, indecipherable icon that looks like a 2D abstract pair of testicles.
To me this is simple to the point of being excessively simple, especially with the "missed calls" being in a 16x16 click target dropdown.
It looks like they optimized for "calls from grandma" mode.
- answering a video call freezes the app. It recovers 10s later but video is not transmitted out
- 4 seconds to load in contact pictures
- typing 5 letters in the contact search field freezes the app for 5 seconds
- scrolling the left sidebar with contact posters is choppy
MS Teams is especially bad for this if you have a few people in your addressbook with the same name and corporate email naming gives you for example john.mcleod@place and john.mcleod2@place - oh, you messaged john.mcleod@ six months ago but you message john.mcleod2 multiple times per day? Then this time you must mean john.mcleod with no 2, this time surely!
My "patch" is basically just Scotland, about half the phone book for the north-west is McLeods, and the John McLeods alone are about two dozen pages, so duplicates are common.
But it also had a full Unix shell underneath. That became my gateway into what was possible on other Unix like OSes, and then that led to going full time with Linux. Now all commercial operating systems are just a way to monetize and advertise to people. Thankfully the open source options have caught up and surpassed them.
The "missed calls" list I mentioned would be more of a filter, which is indeed annoying but not fundamental.
On a personal note, when iChat AV was released, I used to enjoy going into Apple stores and setting up the Macs there with a video conference via Bonjour and I would just leave them that way because I thought it was so neat.
The early days of the Apple Store were so fun. The company was smaller then, and as an employee (or really anybody) you could just show up and start answering customer questions.
I remember when the Palo Alto store opened in 2001 they handed out T-shirts on the first day. I still have mine in a big box of old apple T-shirts from back in that era.
We should probably keep the rest of this conversation private. My email is in the blog post, so feel free to reach out there if you're interested, and if so, thanks in advance!