Good morning, munchkins!…

Good morning, munchkins! There's a camera stuck on top of my monitor, staring at me. It's a little disconcerting.

See, Jed decided to get me my birthday present a little early (so we could play with it more, faster :-). It's an iSight camera from Apple, which, combined with their iChat feature, means that anyone with a camera attached to their computer can theoretically log on and see early-morning-unbrushed-hair-groggy-eyes me, staring at the computer and typing. I'm not entirely sure how all of this will work; he set it up last night after I fell asleep, and now he's asleep, so I'm waiting for him to wake up before we can try it out. Maybe I can even use this to just broadcast video to y'all? Whether or not you have one of these spiffy cameras? It's all unclear to me. But if you want to try chatting, drop me an e-mail, and I'll tell you my AIM screenname (which is I think all you need to see me?) Really, all very unclear to me!

5 thoughts on “Good morning, munchkins!…”

  1. So just to make sure I absolutely understand this — they don’t need a camera to receive, right? I wouldn’t be able to see them without a camera, but I would get audio?

    Hey, maybe we should schedule a Mary Anne-chat. 🙂 Is there a limit on how many people can log into a chat session? (I’m a total newbie to this, obviously, and will be asking a lot of dumb-ass questions.)

  2. Yep, they don’t need a camera to receive, they just need the new version of iChat that knows how to receive it. I’ve only used it for 1:1 chats so far. Send me your screen name!

  3. Okay, so after some experimentation (thanks, Jenn!), we think we’ve clarified some things. With this setup, we can:

    a) exchange video with other people using an appropriately hooked up camera and iChat AV (freely downloadable if you’re on a Mac with at least system 10.2)

    b) exchange audio with other people using iChat AV (ditto previous)

    c) do one-way video with people who have iChat AV but no camera on their end (Jenn could see us, but we couldn’t see her)

    d) only open one audio or video channel at a time — so no multi-person chats, sadness — I had visions of a dozen little windows with video open all over my screen, but that is not yet to be

    e) do text chat with as many people who have iChat as we want

    We’re still not clear on how well any of the AV stuff talks to IBM computers.

    My AIM screenname is maryannemohanraj — if there’s a reason to keep it a secret I can’t think what it is, since I can decline messages anytime I want. So chat me up, baby!

    I am having too much fun. Work? What work?

  4. The AV stuff in iChatAV doesn’t interoperate with other videoconferencing systems. As you’ve found, the text part interoperates fine with anyone who has an AIM-compliant text messaging system.

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