Friday May 23
 
18:22
 
How To Video Chat With A PC User From The Mac

It was surprisingly difficult to find a way to video chat with PC user from the Mac.

Apple provide iChat - but that’s pretty useless. The only PC client iChat will video chat with is AIM - and who uses AIM outside the US? From the reports I’ve read, even that compatibility isn’t great - with iChat only working with certain versions of the AIM client. In the end, I ruled out AIM - I didn’t want to have to ask my friends to install AIM, go through all the hassles of getting an ID, and then find out it doesn’t work.

Ideally I would have liked something which worked with MSN Messenger (Windows Live Messenger), because all my Korean friends use MSN for video chat. So far the only way I have been able to video chat with MSN users is to run XP using VMWare Fusion - that works, but it is sluggish, and it seems to use only the center part of the iSight image.

What I wanted was something that would work reliably and effortlessly. I would need to get my friends to install a new chat client to be able to talk with me, so I wanted something which “just works”. In the end, I found three options:

1. Yahoo Messenger (to other Yahoo users only - video chat doesn’t work to MSN users).

2. Skype

3. Sightspeed

Since I use Skype anyway on the PC, I went with Skype. It’s a bit of a heavy client, but it works well - and that’s what matters. Plus, these days many people have Skype installed anyway for international calling.

It is slightly surprising, though, that iChat is so limited. In my view, Apple should do more to make it easy to communicate with PC users. It doesn’t project a good image of the Mac when Mac users are forced to say to Windows users: “Mac doesn’t work with XXX.” It only reiterates the image that Mac is limited.