Monday, July 7, 2003

I've been using Apple's iChat AV and iSight camera regularly for about a week. My comments so far: Sound quality is an issue - you really need a good microphone on both ends (the iSight has a very good microphone, but I've only connected with four iSight users and a dozen people who mostly use the built-in microphone on their laptop or desktop) Combining this with an instant messenger tool (iChat) is clearly the right thing to do. Augmenting the chat with text and still photos works very well. The barrier for overseas calls quickly goes away. I have made over five hours of calls to Europe and Australia in the past week - all of them with quality equal to or better than the normal international phone calls I've made. Improving the audio codec would make the experience much better - folklore is that the next release of the software will offer wider bandwidth audio codecs (certainly 7KHz and possibly more). At that point this will sound much better than the normal phone. iChat AV needs more adjustable parameters for the camera to deal with interesting lighting conditions. That said, the camera is better than any webcam I've seen. Simplicity of operation is impressive - it is better than any computer based VoIP or video chat applications I've seen (and I've seen over a dozen). There is a list of things I would like to see implemented. More on that later - probably after the next beta release. 7:17:02 AM     LastFM is another try at a collaborative music tool - this sort of thing has been around for at least five years. I've been using it for a few days and haven't been entirely impressed (site slowness, probably with the stream, weird music suggestions, ...), but this sort of experiment is interesting. It is probably better than the drivel you get on ClearChannel. My own belief is that interesting DJs who cater to interesting genres (where I might pick the genre and tune to a particular DJ) is a much better approach. I want hundreds of DJs, each with their own voice. I don't want something like Firefly.... 6:56:07 AM     Government Information Awareness is a response to the proposed Total Information Awareness plan. At this point it isn't well fleshed out and it remains to be seen if it is a force for clueful goodness or something wrong. Performance of the site has been terrible - it has probably been linked by more than a few people. 5:26:26 AM

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

© Copyright 2003 Steve Crandall. Last update: 8/1/03; 10:17:38 PM. This theme is based on the SoundWaves (blue) Manila theme.