I find the PC vs. Mac ads that Apple is running at the moment amusing, but it does strike me as odd that a company with a brand as strong as Apple’s would drop to what is effectively bragging (even p***s envy?). It seems I’m not the only one either – from listening to TWiT episode 76 earlier today, it seems that “virtually everyone who watches it comes away liking the ‘PC guy’ while wanting to push the ‘Mac guy’ under a bus“!
But hey… what’s my point exactly? Well, according to Apple’s get a Mac website (at the time of writing), reason number 1 to get a Mac is:
“It just works. How much time have you spent troubleshooting your PC? Imagine a computer designed by people who hate to waste time as much as you do. Where all the hardware and software just works, and works well together. Get a Mac and get your life back.”
Wake up and smell the coffee guys. I love my Mac, but it does not “just work”. That’s why I’ve spent hours (literally) using a third party utility to get iChat AV working without forking out for a .Mac account. It’s not the first time either, I’ve blogged before about how getting things to work on a Mac is not always as straightforward as it should be. I love my Mac but it has problems, as does any PC running any operating system (open or closed, proprietary or open-source).
This is what I had to do…
Apple iChat AV (I’m using v3.1.5 on Mac OS X 10.4.8) supports .Mac and AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) logins. It also supports Jabber – so I thought I’d prove the concept by getting it working with Google Talk (which is also based on Jabber). That turned out to be pretty straightforward – Google even provide instructions for configuring iChat for Google Talk. That’s all very well, but my contacts all use ICQ or MSN/Windows Live Messenger – wouldn’t it be great to get them all working within iChat? ICQ is another easy one… just add an AIM account to iChat and enter your ICQ number as the AIM screen name, but that still doesn’t help with any of the other services.
Luckily Melvin Rivera at All Forces has written a comprehensive article about iChat to MSN through Jabber. In theory, this should work for any service, since Jabber acts as a gateway for communication with the various IM networks. I followed Melvin’s article to:
- Download and install PSI.
- Create a Jabber account – I chose a UK provider – tuff.org.uk – largely because their site gives a lot of information.
- Register the Jabber account within PSI.
- Select the required services (I chose MSN and ICQ – I’ll probably add more later but an account is required on each connected service).
At this point, my MSN contacts all started to appear in the PSI client… although each one needed to be authorised (and the multiple alerts meant I had to force quit PSI a couple of times). Incidentally, if a load of contacts are stuck on waiting for authorization (this happened to me, and from reading the comments on Melvin’s article it’s not uncommon) right-clicking and selecting rerequest authorization from seemed to fix things (I then needed to open the alert which came back for each contact). I thought at first this meant getting all my contacts to approve me again but as long as the MSN servers know I’m not blocked from these contacts, the authorisation is immediate.
Now, here’s the bit that I didn’t work out immediately… once the contacts have been sucked out of MSN (or elsewhere) and into Jabber, quit PSI… otherwise all the IM conversations occur within PSI, instead of iChat.
Next, I configured iChat to use the tuff.org.uk Jabber server – the settings were the same as for Google Talk (except for the account name/password and the server). After that iChat was working with MSN and ICQ. For cross-platform instant messaging at least.
The next stage was to get video/audio conferencing working. This is where I roped in a friend, using another Mac, connected via ADSL from his home a few miles away. It took us a while to get things going – in the end it was a MacRiot article about port forwarding to avoid iChat AV no audio/video woes that gave the answer, referring us to Apple’s document about using iChat AV with a firewall or NAT router.
After opening TCP ports 5190, 5220, 5222 and UDP ports 5060, 5190, 5678 and 16384-16403 on my Internet-facing router, my friend was able to successfully invite me to an audio/video conversation (although for some reason I don’t see the icons to invite him). Incidentally, on a local network there will be additional ports required for client firewall configurations (UDP 5297, TCP/UDP 5298 and UDP 5353) and my Internet connection is NATted, so that is handled too. I just need to work out why I can’t see the options to invite contacts to audio or video chats (and to buy a webcam – my Sony CMR-PC1 is unsupported on a Mac and my DV camera turns itself off after a few minutes).
(Whilst I was cursing Apple for not making this easier, my mate Alex pointed out that getting video conferencing working on a Windows PC would probably be just as bad… I replied that Microsoft don’t state that their software “just works” – just as well really – and nor do Apple caveat their marketing rhetoric with “subject to firewall/network configuration”)!
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