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.
"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 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 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.
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.
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*.
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.
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.
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!)