Welcome to the world of audio chatting.

Yesterday Apple presented new stuff. I would definitely like to have one of the new G5 machines, but I surely won’t have the money. Panther is a different thing – I’m looking forward to Panther (Mac OS X 10.3) very much, I only fear that it won’t run too well on my old iBook and the Pismo that I have. The Panther release might be time for getting the 900Mhz G3 processor update for the Pismo.

But I do want to write about another thing Apple published yesterday: iChat AV, the new version of Apple’s chat program. Kerstin and I installed it and it works beautifully. I am very impressed. It is full duplex (i.e. both people can talk and listen at the same time), and the sound quality is very good. There are only a few dropouts now and then, but we might get that optimized sooner or later. It’s gorgeous. Our phone bill is quite likely to shrink by a certain amount.
The only problem I had was with my overly restrictive firewall setting and with getting the audio in to the G4 at home, but after some cooperative hacking of the firewall (thanks Kerstin!) and some plugging in and out of cables and devices (thanks Chr!) everything is vanilla.

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