| Friday, September 27, 2002 |
17:43 - iChat gets critical thumbs-up
http://siliconvalley.internet.com/news/article.php/1471311
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I was initially leery of how well iChat would go over in what's certainly a well-saturated market of instant-messaging clients and networks; the people who IM as a lifestyle are a demanding bunch, and while most people's choice of IM client derives from whichever one most of their friends are using, they have been known to switch clients if something clearly better presents itself. The field has its own punditry and intense critics, and one feature not "nailed" can earn an IM client an irrevocable panning.
So I'm pleased to see that Bob Woods, managing editor of a site called "InstantMessagingPlanet", has officially come out not just as a Mac user, but as a staunch supporter of iChat. He spends two pages rhapsodizing about what's good about it-- the auto-logging feature, the ease of importing "avatar" pictures, the little status messages you can set that are immediately visible, and the general cleanness and crispness of the interface. He mentions, quite rightly, that the UI isn't distracting like clients such as AIM and ICQ are (especially on Windows, where they're full of weird web links and ads and confusing UI geegaws).
But I don't think he goes quite far enough in saying just how well the UI, which reminds him of "a vertical iTunes", is pulled-off. This UI has been very carefully crafted. It has a whole suite of sound effects that, while most people swiftly turn such things off (like with that horrid CLACKETY-CLACKETY typewriter noise that someone thought would be a good thing to enable by default in ICQ), actually manages to complement the user interface rather than complicating it. An instant-messaging system does hinge on audio cues, so you know when someone's sending you a message while you're working in other windows. But instead of ICQ's nerve-grating Pokémon "Uh-oh!" noise, a new message in iChat simply pops up-- transparently, in the upper right corner-- with a soft "thPop!" sound. (It even "splats" visually onto the screen, as though it were a blob of Silly Putty flung at you from someone deep in the innards of your LCD.)
New messages during a chat session are signalled by a gentle modulated "woop" sound. And when people come and go in your Buddy List, they make a very soft "swoosh" noise as the list rearranges. (Naturally, these are all independently configurable. You can even set up custom sounds and behaviors on a per-user basis, which I think is pretty damn cool.)
It takes a great deal of inspiration and UI expertise to design a sound scheme that doesn't make me want to turn it off. I like how iChat sounds. But I wouldn't dream of running ICQ with the sound effects on, no matter how the silence cripples my ability to keep track of contacts.
The iChat workflow is also rather different from what I simply never realized was really maddening in ICQ, before it introduced the single-window message/history mode, which is still only a half solution. In ICQ (and presumably AIM and the others), you have your list of buddies, and when one of them sends you a message, an indicator by their name blinks. You don't get to see what the message is until you double-click on it. You can then use the same window to write a reply, and then you can keep it open to continue exchanging messages in that window. Once you're talking in this manner, the conceptual difference between a series of single-window messages and a "Chat" becomes rather muddled. (Chats generally can involve multiple people, and text is sent continuously, rather than in one-shot messages. But the distinction is far less meaningful than it used to be.)
In iChat, there's no indicator for when someone has sent you a message; the message simply appears in the upper-right corner of the screen, floating, and it never interrupts whatever application you're working in. If you click to bring the message forward, it solidifies and expands to offer you a "return message" box. You can close the window, or enter a message; if you do the latter, the window expands to a full-size interactive "chat" window, and Apple makes no distinction between that mode and a "Chat" as other IM clients have defined it. If you've sent more than one message in the conversation, you're "chatting"-- so the program doesn't mince words, it doesn't make you juggle multiple windows, it doesn't make you reach for extra commands to switch modes. It just does what you clearly want to do. You can add more people to an in-progress chat, and every such conversation is logged automatically if you choose (saved logs open up in iChat windows so you can scroll back through them in the same application interface). The chat keeps going, interspersing timestamps every few minutes (very helpful!), until the chat's members leave by closing the window.
This means iChat doesn't even need to have the Buddy List or Rendezvous contact list windows open, or even for the iChat program to be running. OS X keeps a "stub" version of iChat running at all times, if you configure it so (with a checkbox in Preferences), so if someone sends you a message while iChat isn't running it simply starts it and splats the message at you. You can control your availability status and send messages to other users entirely from the chat-bubble icon in the System Menus up by the clock. The only reason to pull up the contact-list windows is to see who's around.
(Incidentally, because iChat is woven into the system, it sets itself to "Idle" after there has been no activity on the computer for a set period of time, which I believe is ten minutes. Most clients can't tell whether you're working in other applications or what; but iChat can monitor keyboard and mouse input and use that to determine whether you're "idle" or not. I had iChat up, and Kris moved his machine's mouse to wake up the sleeping monitor. The iChat client running on that machine signalled mine and I heard the "swoosh" of the list rearranging before I heard the twong of his CRT turning on. Now that's slick.)
One side effect of this setup, though, is that iChat provides no mechanism for sending messages to offline users. ICQ and the rest do this; I'll be interested to see whether people find they miss this feature. Bob Woods doesn't even seem to have noticed; nor does he mind the fact that iChat's input line is only a line, rather than the full text input area that other clients give you. (This has the effect of psychologically making you limit the size of the messages you send. This may or may not be a bad thing.)
File transfer is very bloody easy; you can drag files right into the input line. Sending Web links is a little weirder; you can enter a URL or an e-mail address, and the receiver iChat will convert it into a link. Fine. But you can also use Command+K to insert a link, which gives you a window to specify a URL, and then assigns that URL to a string of clickable text (e.g. "Link") in the input window, which you can change to whatever you want. Interesting decision, there.
Woods has a few complaints about iChat; the Help is lacking in a lot of key information, which is a common source of shame for Apple-- sparse Help documentation is a perennial problem in almost all of their software. The other thing he doesn't like is that you can't group your contacts-- he uses the AIM metaphor of "folders", though I think that's ridiculous for a means of organizing people. I'd prefer the "groups" metaphor of ICQ.
The only thing keeping me from using iChat more than ICQ right now is that all my friends are on ICQ, and iChat only talks to AIM. (One would think that since AOL owns both AIM and ICQ, they'd find a way to merge the two. Huh? Huh?) Because while ICQ, after some six years of development, is still a rough-hewn and shoddy piece of poorly tested perma-alpha code that gets in my way as much as enabling me to communicate, iChat is smooth, polished, helpful, clean, and seems to be begging me to use it.
We've got an ad-hoc iChat network here at work, with all the company's Mac users popping in and out of each other's Rendezvous lists without any configuration necessary beyond running the program. (Woods wonders how iChat will interoperate with "Windows-based PCs that can use Rendezvous". Uh, isn't that kind of a moot point? You can't interoperate with something that doesn't exist...) It's very useful for telling where everybody is; whether they're "In Lab", "In Cubicle", "Away from Desk-- Back Shortly", "At Lunch", "In Meeting", and so on. Fortunately, most of my department has now made the plunge and gotten Macs, so it's actually useful in a critical-mass kind of way too.
When Microsoft decides they want to own a market, they whip out the checkbook. When Apple decides they want to get into a market, they throw out all the preconceptions and figure out what it would take to do it right. And by God, they deliver, too.
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