IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT: On the day Leopard is released, I will be doing the following in front of my local Apple store in the International Plaza, Tampa, FL, to raise money for the purchase:
* Selling my body (to females only*)
You'd make more money if you removed that restriction.
ok i will respond to this part of your reply the other part is relevant.
As for getting other people onto ichat that is impossible no one wants to open up a AIM account or pay for .mac for the privilege.
What you mean to say is none of your friends want to. Or no one you know. Since I got a mac in 2001 I have met loads of people that previously didn't use AIM and got a simple account (not like it's very hard now, is it).
As for .Mac, you firstly get a free trial with no prior commitment to buy, then at the end of the trial your allowed to use your .Mac member name with iChat without paying for the rest of the features.
AIM is seen as a real black sheep here. There was no complaint made about iChat i just dismiss it as useless to me. Because i have a fancy im program dose not mean i am going to force it on my friends. It is hard enough getting them to upgrade there version of MSN so i can transfer them onto yahoo witch is a lovely program that causes me no problems and dose most of the things i need it to do without skype.
You have no issues with the mac version of Yahoo IM ? Wow that's a first.
iChat is useless if no one can use it. If it gains yahoo or MSN support then it becomes useful to 90% of the world. AIM is only an American thing, it even has America in the name. That is one of the reasons my colleges shun it, it gives them the wrong impression.
AIM is
mainly an American thing, but isn't restricted to America, many people in many countries use it and have accounts with it. It may not be their default account, but they have an account.
Many people use iChat, it's actually a very useful and well-used IM in the world of mac users. Where is Apple based ? America. Where do they sell a lot of their products and debut their products ? America.
Apple isn't likely to add Yahoo or MSN support to iChat. To do that they'd have to drop their very useful AIM partnership that's utilised by most of their customers (notice: I didn't say all, or you). Plus I'd imagine Microsoft would charge them an arm and a leg for the privilege, which to be economical, would mean every end user would end up paying more for Leopard for the "privilege".
If you don't like AIM then you do know you can use the jabber client of iChat for Gtalk, don't you ? Sure, it's not MSN and Yahoo which seems to be something you wont budge on, but yet another decent offering from another company.
You'll find lots of people who agree it's silly that iChat doesn't support MSN, you'll also find most of iChat's actual users disagreeing with you because the network it is on right now is working much better than MSN or Yahoo for them ever did.
You should try it some time, try a multiple-person audio/video chat, and then come back here and tell me that Yahoo and MSN
really are better IM programs.
Note: I'm not saying you should switch all your friends, I'm simply saying your giving a really good application a bad rip because it doesn't work to the standards you already have... and there are many, many different standards out there... try some of the others some time and you might discover something.
