Does ichat work well with other people who do not have a mac? If so, is there any drawbacks or features that will not work in ichat with the person who owns a pc? Finally, If I have an AIM account and a google talk account, I am able to talk with people from both accounts at the same time right? I do not have to be logged into one account at a time?
Thanks
— Joe
If they use AIM or Jabber, then text chat will work fine. If they use something else like MSN, then you should use MSN on your Mac to chat with them.
For audio and video, they will need AIM. But then it isn't about whether they have a PC or not, it is about what they have on their PC -- audio and video capabilities of their PCs and whether those are compatible with their AIM client.
As for chatting across network, I think it works. Just try it to see. I'm not a big iChat user, so I don't know for sure.
So you can only do a video and audio chat using Aim, and you cannot use Google talk for video and audio chat?
Right. You can use AIM or .Mac (MobileMe) accounts for video/audio. I'm sure you can't do video on Jabber (Google), and pretty sure you can't do audio either.
At least not with iChat. You can use other applications and browser functionality to do them.
Gary: Love your tutorials and advise.I am a senior learning about my Mac and enjoying it. I have done video and audio chats on both Google jabber with iChat as well google now has added audio and video to their web page also.Please note: I uninstalled my google audio and video chat because I ended up getting continual "recovered File" warnings and Recovered File Folders in my trash. Uninstalled it and the problem ceased???
A quick search on that seems to indicate that it is a little bug in Google chat and will be fixed soon.
My daughter is deployed in Afghanistan and I am unable to video chat with her on AIM. I have Ichat and she has a pc. We are able to chat fine but we are unable to use the video part of the chat. PLEASE help us solve this problem I have not seen her in a while and I miss her so much.
Thanks,
It is really hard to diagnose these things, even when the computers are nearby. You've just got to tinker with the settings on both ends. It is impossible for me to tell which settings could be wrong. Or, it could be an issue with the connection on either end (firewall, router settings, ISP, etc).
Maybe try another video chatting solution, like Skype?