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gan6660

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Aug 18, 2008
1,417
0
I was wondering does anyone know if you will be able to use the iChat camera on your Mac to video call someones iPhone 4? Since face time only works on wifi it seems possible.
 
As of now, no, it's not possible.

Many are expecting Apps to come out in the future that will allow this or something similar, though.
 
Everything I've seen so far indicates iPhone to iPhone only to start. However, since Apple did release Facetime as "open source" I'd have to assume they'd eventually also make it compatible with iChat.
 
FaceTime is currently iPhone 4 & Wi-Fi only.

Regarding iChat and FaceTime interoperability: the technical challenge is essentially to exchange IP addresses (after that one can build arbitrarily complex protocols for information exchange).

Perhaps Apple's Push Notification Service can be leveraged to support iChat 'presence' and connectivity...? (Without significant battery drain!)
 
This has been discussed many times. The problem is that Facetime uses phone numbers to identify users in the system. iChat doesn't use phone numbers, it uses screennames. So basically any system that allows you to use Facetime from a non-phone device will be a hack, at best.

Think of it like text messaging. Text messaging also identifies users based on phone number. Several "solutions" for text messaging from a computer have come up, but none of them are ideal. This is probably the same thing that will happen with Facetime.
 
It amazes me Apple released it before it worked with their own chat mechanism on a Mac. Idiots. Makes their little "it changes everything" videos all the more amusing.
 
is iChat really "Apple" though? Doesn't it piggy-back off of AOL or something like that?

Either way, I'm sure an iChat to Facetime solution is not far off. Whether it is a hack or a legitimate app.
 
It amazes me Apple released it before it worked with their own chat mechanism on a Mac. Idiots. Makes their little "it changes everything" videos all the more amusing.

are you serious?

let's all look at fring's and qik's solutions on other phones. They've done studies, you know. 60% of the time it works, every time.

I believe apple went with the, let's just get it working from phone to phone 1st, and then worry about phone to laptop to other devices later.

I don't see any reason for apple not to bring it to ichat
 
"It changes everything" is a lot like "Yes we can."

It's all just good marketing.

I do have faith we will see some cross platform facetime, even Steve hinted at it.
 
I wonder if Apple will change iChat to Facetime so they have the same feature over a bunch of products.
 
"It changes everything" is a lot like "Yes we can."

It's all just good marketing.

I do have faith we will see some cross platform facetime, even Steve hinted at it.

It's an open standard ...that they chose not to support with their own iChat product. Brilliant, Apple. Simply brilliant. Apple loves to clap itself on the back for only doing things when they can do it the best. Yet they couldn't make it talk to iChat? Brilliant.

My guess is jail breakers will make it work in no time. My other guess is that Apple apologists will continue to defend them and their stupid decision.
 
I would kill to be able to talk to another person who has iChat. At the present time, Facetime is just a novelty because not many people have an iPhone 4. Being able to talk to another person with iChat would be a real game changer.
 
It's gonna happen. It wouldn't shock me if we had an iPhone 4 to mac/pc solution within a few weeks.
 
I would kill to be able to talk to another person who has iChat. At the present time, Facetime is just a novelty because not many people have an iPhone 4. Being able to talk to another person with iChat would be a real game changer.

My wife, clueless about tech, summed it up best when I told her about Video chat on the iPhone. She said "Yay now you can ichat with us when you're away on business!" Then I explained its wifi only, and she pointed put most hotels I stay at have wifi. Then I said it's iPhone to iphone only. To which she responded, "Thats just stupid."

Which would make for a good slogan for pretty much all Apple has done this launch: That's just stupid.
 
It's an open standard ...that they chose not to support with their own iChat product. Brilliant, Apple. Simply brilliant. Apple loves to clap itself on the back for only doing things when they can do it the best. Yet they couldn't make it talk to iChat? Brilliant.

My guess is jail breakers will make it work in no time. My other guess is that Apple apologists will continue to defend them and their stupid decision.

Good things take time, and iPhone 4 has only just been released :)

One of the cool things about FaceTime is that it requires no set-up nor log-in. There are some really interesting architectural (and user experience) decisions to be made here in terms of FaceTime and iChat integration.

  • How should iChat calling to FaceTime be supported without iPhone battery drain? Leverage Apple's Push Notification Service?
  • When initiating a video chat to your buddy (who has iMac and iPhone in front of them) then how does the system decide to connect to Mac iChat or iPhone FaceTime?
  • Can live chats be "handed over" from iPhone to Mac, for example when returning home during a conversation?
  • etc

None of these things are insurmountable, of course.
 
Just wait. Pretty soon you will be able to skype video chat or use a 3rd party app to chat between computer and phone, if Apple doesn't put FaceTime into iChat.

If FaceTime is based on phone numbers, then I also have no reason to believe that Apple won't add video chat to the IM program on the iPhone.
 
Just wait. Pretty soon you will be able to skype video chat or use a 3rd party app to chat between computer and phone, if Apple doesn't put FaceTime into iChat.

If FaceTime is based on phone numbers, then I also have no reason to believe that Apple won't add video chat to the IM program on the iPhone.

You can do video calls on Skype from iPhone 4 to computer with Fring. It doesn't look the best but it exists.
 
iChat could easily be updates with a 10 # "serial code" which would serve the same purpose as a phone #. And that serial # could be registered to a certain computer. It's not that "hard" for Apple to implement when/if they decide to do so.
 
It's an open standard ...that they chose not to support with their own iChat product. Brilliant, Apple. Simply brilliant. Apple loves to clap itself on the back for only doing things when they can do it the best. Yet they couldn't make it talk to iChat? Brilliant.

My guess is jail breakers will make it work in no time. My other guess is that Apple apologists will continue to defend them and their stupid decision.

My guess is that you're a clueless git who's never worked in a commercial software company.

There is only so much personal bandwidth available within an organization. When they're on the limit to meet a product deadline, there's no room to do anything else. Apple has been known to re-task people from OS X projects to work on iPhone/iPad projects, and after the product release, the previous tasks get resumed.

I have no doubt that FaceTime-to-iChat AV will come, relatively soon even, but you have to give the developers some time to do it. They can't snap their fingers, code it up, and (the most important part) test the shnizzle out of it to make sure that it "just works" without some *TIME*.
 
My guess is that you're a clueless git who's never worked in a commercial software company.

There is only so much personal bandwidth available within an organization. When they're on the limit to meet a product deadline, there's no room to do anything else. Apple has been known to re-task people from OS X projects to work on iPhone/iPad projects, and after the product release, the previous tasks get resumed.

I have no doubt that FaceTime-to-iChat AV will come, relatively soon even, but you have to give the developers some time to do it. They can't snap their fingers, code it up, and (the most important part) test the shnizzle out of it to make sure that it "just works" without some *TIME*.

This. But I really do hope it will be soon though...
 
is iChat really "Apple" though? Doesn't it piggy-back off of AOL or something like that?

Either way, I'm sure an iChat to Facetime solution is not far off. Whether it is a hack or a legitimate app.

No not really, you see the first option is MobileMe, they just give you the extar options of aol and jabber.
 
My wife, clueless about tech, summed it up best when I told her about Video chat on the iPhone. She said "Yay now you can ichat with us when you're away on business!" Then I explained its wifi only, and she pointed put most hotels I stay at have wifi. Then I said it's iPhone to iphone only. To which she responded, "Thats just stupid."

Which would make for a good slogan for pretty much all Apple has done this launch: That's just stupid.

You should have done your research then before actually buying it for your wife, it clearly states this in their ad campaigns and specifications. They also stated that it would hopefully have the capabilities for over 3G in the not to distant future.
 
FaceTime is currently iPhone 4 & Wi-Fi only.

Regarding iChat and FaceTime interoperability: the technical challenge is essentially to exchange IP addresses (after that one can build arbitrarily complex protocols for information exchange).

Perhaps Apple's Push Notification Service can be leveraged to support iChat 'presence' and connectivity...? (Without significant battery drain!)


I think this is how apples is going to push mobilme as service, they will required a mobile me for facetime to work with iChat, this way your public IP will always be knows by your "cloud" ID.

totally unnecessary and there are many other (better) ways to implement this, however i think this is the way they will do it to generate more interest on mobile me :eek:
 
Hi I was just reading an article about Facetime internals and came across this nugget :

"The User-Agent of the 888-Facetime caller is "Viceroy 1.4/GK", which is similar to the User-Agent used by the iChat video client ("Viceroy 1.3", or "1.2" in older iChat clients)."

So it seems the people on the other end of Apples Facetime test number could have been using an updated iChat.
 
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