This is wonderful. I love that people are still using this!
I worked on iChat AV video. We also added 4-way video conferencing with H.264 support in 2004. Really did feel cutting edge back then. Lots of all-nighters in those days, hand-writing altivec and hand-optimizing h.264 to work on iMacs and iBooks that didn’t have simd..
I'm curious, would you be open to talking about your experience on a podcast with us? https://forkbombpodcast.com/ It's noncommercial, no ads, and is just for fun.
If not, I'd love to know more here. You all must of been really proud of what you built.
It might be a bit before I have time to do a podcast (and also there are many things I can’t talk about because of both the nature of Apple and also the legal mess that is the video field). Anything specific you want to hear more about?
On a personal note, when iChat AV was released, I used to enjoy going into Apple stores and setting up the Macs there with a video conference via Bonjour and I would just leave them that way because I thought it was so neat.
The early days of the Apple Store were so fun. The company was smaller then, and as an employee (or really anybody) you could just show up and start answering customer questions.
I remember when the Palo Alto store opened in 2001 they handed out T-shirts on the first day. I still have mine in a big box of old apple T-shirts from back in that era.
We should probably keep the rest of this conversation private. My email is in the blog post, so feel free to reach out there if you're interested, and if so, thanks in advance!
How many variants of the codecs did you have to implement to make it work?
Thank you for working on this. You added so much enjoyment to using AIM on an eMac circa that time. People talk fondly of their 90's/80's computing experience, but this was mine. It really was a magical time...
By that time, not only was Android looking much more competitive, but FaceTime evidently demonstrated to be a massive hit that became very powerful for Apple's branding.
I also read that FaceTime eventually went from P2P to centralized servers (maybe in response to the lawsuit?), which of course is antithetical to the premise of being open.
Lastly, just speculating, but I imagine Steve Jobs had to have been a strong advocate for making it an open standard, if not the driving force. It makes sense that the promise would have fizzled out by the time the lawsuit was over, a year after his death.