Apple introduces FaceTime for Mac (beta)

One more thing from this morning’s press event: Apple’s bringing FaceTime to the Mac. This comes as no surprise due to the heavy integration of iOS design concepts in Mac OS Mufasa (Lion). FaceTime is video calling app that Apple added to the iPhone 4 and the 4th Generation iPod touch. It was pretty limited considering the fact that there aren’t many 4th Generation iOS devices in the wild… my wife doesn’t even have (or want) one. It’s nice to see it make its way to the Mac, but I have a question: why not just integrate it with iChat? Mac users are familiar with iChat — I daresay that a lot of people buy Macs because they think the video chat capabilities look cool and easy. Adding the video calling features under the name of FaceTime convoluted Apple’s branding: they created feature duplication between iChat and FaceTime. Sure, iChat couldn’t video chat with phones previously but it’s perfectly capable of video chat. That brings me to my next question, why didn’t Apple just create iChat for iOS? That would have had the video calling and give us the coveted iChat interface. (As a side note, Apple seriously needs to [...]

Apple’s Back to the Mac live event reminder

We’ll be discussing the live event here at CTA. Just point your browser to live.cocoatouchapps.com If you haven’t seen Apple’s live stream, here you go: http://events.apple.com.edgesuite.net/1010qwoeiuryfg/event/index.html Remember, it must be opened in Safari on a Mac running 10.6 or an iOS device.

Back to the Mac: CTA coverage on Wednesday

If you haven’t heard by now — you must be living under a rock — Apple is holding a press event on Wednesday October 20th at 10am Cupertino-time. We’ve revamped our live software to make it even easier for you to get in on the discussion. Please head to live.cocoatouchapps.com in order to follow timely updates and talk about the latest Apple revelations. We’re expecting to see a new version of Mac OS announced (we’d be surprised if it ships), a new MacBook Air revision and possibly revisions to Apple’s other MacBook lineups. If we were to take a stab in the dark about un-rumored products, we’d say there’s a new iPad coming out Wednesday as well. There’s no proof of that, but wouldn’t it be nice if that were Apple’s “one more thing…” Join us on Wednesday for a live discussion about Apple’s next best thing. Our software automatically updates in the background without having to the reload the page. You’ll also be able to sign-in using Facebook, Twitter, Google, AOL, Yahoo or Linked|in if you’d like to get involved with the discussion. Update: We forgot to mention that our liveblog software auto-updates on mobile devices as well. Stuck [...]