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Comment by kitsunesoba | Hacker News Reader

There also used to be plugins for iChat (which later became Messages) that added support for MSN Messenger, making for a no-fuss nicely streamlined chat experience across a decent range of networks (AIM, XMPP/Gchat, Yahoo Messenger, and MSN Messenger).

So between modded iChat and Adium, on Mac OS you had the choice between minimal and kitchen-sink style IM clients, both of which were free and had no ads. OS X had also hit peak refinement around that time, between 10.2 and 10.6. It was a brief but golden age for Mac users with a lot of IM friends.

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2010 was a great time. Adium for universal chat and XMPP federated services. You could find almost every movie on Netflix still. You could tell the difference between buttons and labels in UIs, and few hamburger menus were to be found. You could still get AppleWorks. Firefox wasn’t trying to sell you stuff. Televisions didn’t come preloaded with spyware. Truly, it was a great time, but we have to build our cyberpunk future today.

At least we don’t have IE6 any more, so it’s a fair trade.

>Truly, it was a great time, but we have to build our cyberpunk future today.

You know it was thinking about that the other day, and i came to the conclusion that we're back in 1970, our powerful computers are mostly used as Terminals aka Browser connected to powerful monolithic service providers aka Mainframe.

That means Ken Olsen was right and yes even Larry Ellison.

How did I forget about iChat? That brings back memories. Mac 10.4 to 10.6 was glorious. The walled gardens got higher and less fun over the 2010's. Discord works but I am probably one generation too old to appreciate the meme-heavy communication style.

iChat had multi-party video calls and virtual backgrounds in 2008. It blows my mind when Apple talks about multi-party FaceTime calls like it's a new feature.

We had actual video phone calls in 2005, and with the advent of Smartphones they were essentially deprecated. Eventually, Smartphones became capable of making video calls over the Internet with 3G

It was 3G networks that enabled video calls from non smart phones back in 2005. The internet video chat didn't appear until later when HSDPA became a think

I keep hoping that the next version of iOS will include the possibility of adding other instant messaging service backends as iMessage plugins. It would finally unify messaging on iOS.

What iChat plugins were there? I found this[1] for IRC but that's it (and I couldn't make it work despite being on an OS from the era).

It looks like MSN Messenger didn't require a plugin, it worked because it was XMPP which iChat/Messages supported out of the box, up until High Sierra I think.

1: https://www.cocobit.software/support/

Oh, I got IRC to work! Downloaded the example code from Apple's developer site and compiled: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/samplecode/IRCSe...

Then I had to run "killall imagent" in Terminal for it to work properly. Logged right into OFTC in Messages on OS X 10.9 Mavericks.

So... plugins were supported, but it may well be that the only plugin ever made was literally the example Apple released? :(

The MSN plugin was called Cocoon. Its page is available on archive.org[0], but unfortunately images are broken.

[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20121118061309/http://cocoon.dri...

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