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 [...]