

Facetime for the Mac - eddieplan9
http://www.apple.com/mac/facetime/

======
kgroll
I'm definitely not suggesting that Facetime is, or will be, a failure.

Thinking about it, however, reminded me of a passage from Infinite Jest about
the failure of video chat.

 _(1) It turned out there there was something terribly stressful about visual
telephone interfaces that hadn’t been stressful at all about voice-only
interfaces. Videophone consumers seemed suddenly to realize that they’d been
subject to an insidious but wholly marvelous delusion about conventional
voice-only telephony._

...

EDIT: Instead of that wall of text, here's a link to the rest of that passage.
Sorry about that.
[http://stevereads.com/weblog/2010/06/07/iphone-4-facetimeinf...](http://stevereads.com/weblog/2010/06/07/iphone-4-facetimeinfinite-
jest-mashup/)

~~~
commieneko
Facetime, and video-phony in general, fits into a continuum of communication
strategies. When you want to _see_ someone, you video them. When you only want
to hear them, you audio them. When you don't want to hear them you text them.

Then there's the whole time-shifting thingie. What I would like now is the
video equivalent of an email, voice mail, or text message. I _could_ record a
video, and email it, but...

~~~
jbrennan
I agree, FaceMail or something would be incredibly nice, especially as I'm not
always available to answer a video call, but would still like to see what's up
eventually.

I guess it would be used like like YouTube, only privately. That is, often you
see an event and video record it for sharing with others. FaceTime would let
you share this live, and leaving a message seems a natural progression.

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fredleblanc
We just downloaded it and tried it (bringing my total Facetime experiences to
two, both of which occurred about 10 feet from the person on the other end).
The interface is more iOS-y than normal for OS X. The picture quality was
pretty good (the Mac being wired, iPhone 4 being wireless of course).

Simple to use, pretty good stuff.

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lukifer
Is there a reason they couldn't have just folded this feature into iChat?

~~~
e1ven
I wish they had-

It loses several major features of iChat sharing- Screensharing, replaceable
backgrounds, Multi-person chat...

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johns
Which are all features that would ruin FaceTime.

~~~
e1ven
How so? Honestly? Why would it ruin Facetime, but not ruin iChat?

~~~
johns
I bet there are already more non-geek users of FaceTime than iChat because
it's so approachable. Adding features like those caters to the wrong audience.
The beauty of FaceTime is its simplicity.

(This sounds like an Apple fanboy thing to say, but I'm really not.)

~~~
slantyyz
I would also say using iChat also dilutes the FaceTime brand.

~~~
derefr
In the event video, the FaceTime icon had replaced the iChat icon's
traditional position on the dock.

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neovive
Facetime could become a strong competitor to Skype once a Windows client is
available as the UI seems very polished and well "integrated". Now only if my
parents had a Mac so I can test it out. They always seem to have issues
getting video chat working on Skype/Windows.

~~~
moe
Not really.

Skype is strong in businesses. In the office-setting people first and foremost
use the text-chat, then the _audio_ calls, then the conference calls. Video
calls come dead last. I wouldn't be surprised if even desktop sharing is used
more than the video feature.

~~~
alphabeat
The desktop sharing of skype has a long way to go to be used seriously. I can
only assume from your comment that you haven't used it. They may have their
audio codec down, and the video codec works for live video, but not for
content. It's the same deal with JPEG for text for instance.

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bobx11
called the wife from the mac to her iphone... she didn't know the difference.
later she called me back on facetime to the pc and it just popped up - overall
not bad!

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philwelch
Accounts are tied to the email address on your Apple ID. Interesting way of
getting around having to create another IM account.

~~~
e1ven
It's also portable to when there is a version of FaceTime for Android/etc.
They had originally claimed it to be an open standard.

~~~
glhaynes
Yeah, has there been any progress on publishing specs?

~~~
mikedanko
According to the presentation, it's supposed to be made a standard. I'm
assuming this would hit the IETF's Audio/Video transport working group, so
that'd be where to keep a lookout.

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dmpatierno
My favorite feature of FaceTime for the Mac: it stays full screen even when
you tab away to do work on another monitor.

FaceTime is now my preferred video conferencing software.

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pluies
Why set the minimum OS to Snow Leopard? That sounds a bit of a far-fetched
requirement for some videoconferencing software.

~~~
g_lined
My guess is that it uses some newer APIs which were introduced in 10.6. This
may be because they wanted to use Grand Central Dispatch (better multi-core
support), a later addition to Core Graphics or simply an API which gave their
GUI the more iOS feel compared to the GUI elements in 10.5.

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eli
It would be exciting if I'm proven wrong, but I'm not buying the hype about
video chat.

Even if/when I'm able to video chat anyone from my iPhone without being on
wifi, I still don't imagine it being terribly useful. And the few times I've
tried using video chat in a business setting have not been very fruitful.

~~~
gurraman
Video chat is just one of those nice-to-haves in my opinion.

I work remotely a lot and always choose audio chat over video chat. Video
chatting, in that context, just doesn't add anything for me.

Video chat was great when my girlfriend was living abroad for a couple of
months though!

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rflrob
"the call rings through on every Mac you own, even if face time isn't running"

Does this sound just a little too intrusive to anyone else?

~~~
ynniv
Have you heard of a telephone? Do you know how they work?

You can turn it off in the preferences.

~~~
Samuel_Michon
You just made me laugh out loud, which I rarely do while sitting at a
computer. I honestly thought rflrob's comment made a lot of sense, until I
read yours.

I have to say though: I absolutely loathe doorbells and ringing phones, they
stress me out. Ideally, my doorbell would have a vibrate mode, making the
floor gently purr.

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nico
I just wish there was a Facetime API.

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todd3834
I like the icon. I am really glad to see they didn't go the same direction as
the new iTunes icon.

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thought_alarm
Judging from this FaceTime app and the new iLife apps, it looks like there
will be all sorts of new iOS-like UI goodies for Cocoa 10.7 developers to use.

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hasenj
Is this different from yahoo messenger's video calls?

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zacharycohn
iPhone <\--> Desktop

~~~
pt
Both have platform limitations at this time:

Facetime: iPhone <\--> Mac

Yahoo Messenger : iPhone <\--> PC

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contol-m
Nope. Yahoo Messenger video chat works on a Mac as well.

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eddieplan9
Unfortunately, it mistakenly points to iWork 09 trial download for now.

~~~
philfreo
First 2 times it didn't work, then I got it:
[http://appldnld.apple.com/FaceTime/061-9589.20101020.Mbgt5/F...](http://appldnld.apple.com/FaceTime/061-9589.20101020.Mbgt5/FaceTime.dmg)

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CharlesPal
Use the bottom link. The top link is pointing to iWork 09

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ceejayoz
Can't get it to connect. @SteveStreza reports his doesn't work on a wired
connection at all.

