Wednesday, May 15, 2002 |
11:02 - More NDA Breaches: iChat Screenshots
http://www.thinksecret.com/features/jaguarichat/
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Quick-- suck 'em down while you still can.
I'm not warming to iChat very much. Yes, it has some cool features-- pictures, nice name formatting options, cutesy speech bubbles, the whole "local network" thing, and so on. But it also seems to be targeted even further downmarket-- or at least down-age-bracket-- than the existing iApps.
There are things that ICQ does, for instance, that I need from an IM client: a Privacy list, for one thing, where I can control who sees me online and limit it to a specified list of people. iChat appears only to support Online, Away, and Offline modes. Also, the text input field only seems to be a single line; I'm used to ICQ's large textarea input box. I like to type long messages and be able to see the whole thing. iChat seems like it'll work great for quick one-line messages, but is that really how most people talk?
In any case, iChat appears to be very incomplete right now-- a lot of the features, like user pictures and name formatting options, have FEATURE NOT YET IMPLEMENTED banners plastered over them. So maybe there's a long way yet to go, in design as well as in execution. But even so, I sort of doubt that iChat will be one of my favorite go-Apple-go banner-waver topics anytime soon. Ah well.
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