Late last night, several rumor websites, including CrunchGear, reported that they had received copies of "leaked" iPhone advertisements. These ads depict matte black and Product (Red) iPhones. Most of the sites that were sent these images are calling them fakes, including our own Engadget.
There are two major flaws that stick out in these images, the first of which is the lack of a sleep/wake button on the red iPhone in the image above. The second of which: where the iChat details are shown, the requirements state "Windows Xp." However, Apple always states "XP" as just that; not upper case, then lower case letters.
We do have to agree with Engadget when it comes to the video chat images. Ryan Block states, "No Apple design would be laid out the way this guy's got his page laid out here." We have to agree -- Apple designs are normally clean and minimalist; not jumbled as these images are.
If you're a dedicated Conan watcher, you'll know that Conan O'Brien's normal bandleader, Max Weinberg, is often out on the road playing on tour with Bruce Springsteen, and away from the show for long periods of time. Conan misses Weinberg as much as we do, apparently, and so last night he decided to get back in touch with none other than Apple's own iChat video conferencing.
Sure enough, it's not a fake -- while there are lots of audio and video cables coming off of Conan's MacBook Pro, when they show the desktop (Leopard) and later on bring in a third person, you can see that it really is iChat, running as normal -- the cables are likely just to grab the audio and video for the broadcast.
Unfortunately, this also shows off iChat's limits -- while the technology is cool, it won't necessarily make the people you call any more interested in talking. Odds are that "drummerboymax08" isn't that interested in chatting with you either. Thanks, Sabi! Video via Macenstein
I held the phone tightly in my right hand. With my left, I rubbed my dry, tired eyes. I looked at the clock in my Mac's menu bar. I had been on the phone for forty-five minutes, with no indication that I'd be hanging it up any time soon.
"OK," I said in a slow, deliberate tone. "Let's start from the beginning. Click on the Mail menu. A list should appear. Do you see it?"
A pause. "Yes," my mother said.
"What do you see in that list?" I said.
"File ... About Mail ... Preferences ...."
"Good. Do you see 'Quit'?"
"Yes."
"Excellent. Click on 'Quit' and we'll start again."
Welcome to my personal hell, circa 2006. Pull up a chair. Get comfortable. We're going to be here for quite a while.
The gentlemen at ecamm networks have a slew of products already in production: iGlasses, Call Recorder, and plenty more. Watch the video for demos of iLidz, iPhone Disk, and an unreleased video hack for the iPhone that's got to be seen to be believed. Video moved into the continuation for faster home page loading.
I'm always, well, tickled by the things that can happen when you use Terminal commands that begin with "defaults write" -- thus changing the preferences for applications, the Finder, and more, often in ways that you can't accomplish via GUI pref settings. I also get a certain warmness from Leopard's Data Detectors, but I have to confess I rarely use them. It's fun to watch the things that Mail can pick up on, and I've often tested to see what exactly iCal will make of it, but I guess some people just get better emails than I do. Strangely, I do get dates and info via instant messaging on a more regular basis.
You can enable Data Detectors in iChat with one simple command in Terminal:
You can disable it using the same command, but change the '1' to a '0.' Now you get the fun job of calling your closest Mac-using relative and explaining Terminal so they can use a feature that Apple hid from public view for what I can only assume were valid reasons. I hope your aunt has her screen-sharing figured out.
I've got two toddlers who love video chatting with grandma and grandpa. It starts out cute, but quickly deteriorates into the two of them jumping around in front of the different effects and backgrounds.
This free download adds 48 new effects to iChat, including outer space, a mildly disturbing cube effect and a pretty cool hologram. More iChat Effects is a Universal Binary and includes an uninstaller, just in case you don't want to chat as the Mona Lisa. Thanks, Grant!
Here's an interesting list of applications supposedly killed by Leopard. There's no question that there's a huge amount of functionality in Leopard that was taken care of in Tiger by third-party apps (and this is just a list of freeware-- commenters pointed out last week that Jisho was made almost obsolete by the Japanese dictionary included with Leopard), but I'm not so sure this list is all it promises to be. No amount of tweaking to Spotlight will ever replace Quicksilver, and as good as iChat has gotten, I still like Adium for its easy customization.
And apps like CenterStage, who used to have a one goal (an open source Front Row replacement), have now been able to spread out and become more their own program instead of worrying about Apple's missing functionality.
As always, the best app for the job depends on both the job and the person doing it, so there are probably more than a few places where Leopard stepped up to fill functionality that users used to trust third-party software for. But it's a stretch at least to say Leopard killed these apps-- replication of one function now built into the OS doesn't mean all the apps other functions are useless.
Here's a nice piece of freeware. Now that Aqua's shiny buttons are all but history, the glossy balloons in iChat really stand out. If you would prefer something more subtle, check out iChat Matte. It replaces those eyesores with flat, matte bubbles that are more pleasant to look at.
Version 2.0 is compatible with Leopard (there is a Tiger version as well), accepts custom colors and includes an uninstaller. iChat Matte is free. Now, if only I could do the same thing with SMS on the iPhone....
Long ago, way back in the days before Leopard, the Chax plugin was a necessity for any serious iChatter. But then lo came the new cat, and iChat 4.0 brought with it many of Chax's headline features already built-in: chief among them the tabbed chat interface. But yet some things are still lacking in the shiny new iChat, perhaps most importantly Growl support. So it was with some satisfaction that I see that Chax 2.0b1 is out and returns the flood of iChat Growl notifications to my Leopard desktop. Though its feature list is, per force, shorter than in the old Tiger days, Chax still adds a handy chat-log viewer (organized by buddy), buddy icons in the Dock, and various other little tweaks to make iChat 4.0 feel like home.
Chax 2.0b1 is a free download (donations requested) and is a SIMBL based Input Manager.
Update: For those of you having trouble getting Chax to work properly, you may need to reinstall SIMBL. Be sure to uninstall any previous version (particularly any from a previous Tiger install living at ~/Library/Input Managers).
As far as "Back to My Mac" is concerned, Apple presents it as a .Mac-only enhancement. Melvin Rivera pointed us to his blog post showing how to use Back to My Mac with iChat. This technique isn't for the faint of heart. It involves editing system preferences, modifying AppleScript, and causing your computer to always stay awake. Other than that, it's a great way to get around the Back to My Mac limitations and use your computer remotely.
Rob Griffiths over at Macworld points to an interesting new feature in Leopard's iChat: the ability to run AppleScripts in response to events. If you look in the Alerts tab of iChat's preferences there's a checkbox for running an AppleScript when a user selectable event (e.g. a text invitation) occurs. As you can see above, Apple includes three default scripts that allow for automatically accepting or declining an invitation, and better yet, controlling iTunes.
How might this be useful? One obvious way is controlling a music server in a different room just by sending IMs. "You can... send the iTunes-owning Mac these commands as chat messages from another Mac: status, next, previous, mute, unmute, help, play, and pause." A nifty little addition to iChat, I think, and since you can add your own AppleScripts, it opens up the possibility of doing something similar for a variety of other applications as well. (Incidentally, these built-in scripts live at /Library/Scripts/iChat.)
When Leopard was released a lot of folks (well okay, just Star Wars geeks, but nonetheless) lamented the loss of the hologram style iChat AV effect demonstrated back at WWDC. Well for those folks, a little birdy told me that the Quartz Composer file for this effect can be downloaded here (download link). Just pop it into your /Library/Compositions folder, restart iChat and it should be available as one of the video effects. This file was apparently taken from one of the earlier developer builds of Leopard.
If you want a different take on the same idea, there's also a fan made version over at Mac Rumors.
As with the Dock review they did last week, they first take a look at the history of iChat, but iChat actually got started fairly late in the world of instant messaging. Apple started it out by working with other protocols (one reason it's worked so well since then, I'd bet). iChat AV was the most significant update so far, adding videoconferencing that, thanks to the built-in iSights on most Macs nowadays, made the feature widespread.
To me, iChat 4.0's most exciting new feature is the document and screen sharing. Via VNC, both Mac and PC users have been able to share screens for a while, but the process has always been complicated (in most cases, so complicated that the problem you're actually trying to fix by screen sharing is less complicated than sharing screens itself). But iChat 4.0 is meant to make the process easy. There are also lots of fun video implementations-- including an "Obi-wan" setting I can't wait to try-- to go along with videoconferencing.
Day to day, I generally use Adium as an IM client (the look and configurability sells it for me), but the new features in iChat 4.0 will definitely tempt me to check them out, if not switch completely. Just 9 days left!
If you want to customize your iSight output for chatting or video recording, there's a quick and cheap way to do it: iGlasses from ecamm network, only $9.95 for a whole kit bag of adjustments, colorizations, exposure controls and pan/zoom options. The 2.0 version was released earlier today (a free upgrade for previous licensees) and adds exposure lock for the built-in iSight camera among other new features.
I find myself using the exposure control a lot to manage iChat video in poor lighting conditions; you can check it out for yourself by downloading the demo here.
Attention all ye users of Adium, Skype, iChat, Twitter, Facebook and Jaiku - Brett Terpstra has struck again with MoodSwing, his excellent utility for updating your status across all these apps and services. Why do I call it a utility instead of just a Quicksilver action, you ask? Because Brett is now providing both the original action and a new full-blown menubar app - at the request of TUAW readers - called MoodBlast. Both now live on the same download page at Brett's Circle Six Design blog, and they both allow you to update your status across all the aforementioned services at once. While MoodSwing is an action you set-and-forget to work with Quicksilver (though you can reconfigure later), an advantage of the MoodBlast menubar app is that you're presented with the UI you see above every time you activate it, with any services you used previously already selected for updating. The other advantage of the MoodBlast app, of course, is that you don't need Quicksilver in order to minimize the effort spent for online socialization.
As with his other excellent projects, Brett Terpstra provides MoodSwing and MoodBlast as donationware.
I held the phone tightly in my right hand. With my left, I rubbed my dry, tired eyes. I looked at the clock in my Mac's menu bar. I had been on the phone for forty-five minutes, with no indication that I'd be hanging it up any time soon.
I'm always, well, tickled by the things that can happen when you use Terminal commands that begin with "
I've got two toddlers who love video chatting with grandma and grandpa. It starts out cute, but quickly deteriorates into the two of them jumping around in front of the different effects and backgrounds. 
Here's an interesting list of applications 
Here's a nice piece of freeware. Now that Aqua's shiny buttons are all but history, the glossy balloons in iChat really stand out. If you would prefer something more subtle, check out 
Long ago, way back in the days before Leopard, the 
When Leopard was released a lot of folks (well okay, just Star Wars geeks, but nonetheless) lamented the loss of the hologram style iChat AV effect demonstrated back at WWDC. Well for those folks, a 
Apple Insider 
