At Apple’s “big event” today, one of the announcements I found most interesting was that Apple’s proprietary FaceTime video protocol would now be available for Mac computers. To date it has only been available for the iPhone 4 and iPod Touch. Naturally, I had to give it a try! 😉 I’ll show the usage here and then mention some problems I found with this “beta”.
USING FACETIME FOR MAC
Installing FaceTime for Mac was a straightforward download, doubleclick and go through the installer. Once you launch the app, you have to verify the email address you want to use to receive calls. After that, your screen loads to show your video and the contacts in your Mac OS X Address book:
Jim Courtney and I usually try out new toystools like this and sure, enough, he was online and called me.
The first time, though, he used an email address that I did not have associated with my Mac. It nicely automagically called me on my mobile (which was also in Jim’s Address Book record for me) and we had a MacBook-to-iPhone call.
It worked fine and we had a great call. It was actually quite handy in that I could position the iPhone wherever I wanted it to give a decent view.
Next up I gave Jim a call from my iMac using his email address. The call went through to Jim and we were soon talking Mac-to-Mac. Audio and video quality were both quite excellent.
Given Apple’s intense focus on design, it was no surprise that with FaceTime for the Mac after you accepted the call and stopped moving the mouse, the call controls just slid out of sight leaving the focus on the communication you had with the other party. Two views:
Naturally if you move your mouse back over the video window the controls come back in view. One of the controls let you go full-screen, which was quite the experience on a 27-inch iMac 🙂 You also have a control on your window that lets you rotate the view from portrait to landscape. The result looked like this:
And no, Jim’s video was not as crisp when blown up to the full-screen size on my iMac. It was fine for viewing and for our call, though.
After we hung up, I played a bit more with the app and found that in the preferences you can associate multiple email addresses with your Apple account:
The preferences are, as you can see, rather limited.
PROBLEMS
Overall, FaceTime for the Mac seemed to work rather well. I did though, note these issues:
- HOW DO YOU SHUT THE VIDEO OFF? – You read that right… there doesn’t seem to be any way to shut the video OFF. When you launch FaceTime, it takes over your camera and then continues to show you video of yourself in the FaceTime window. There are two issues here:
- Using the camera does impact CPU performance. Not a huge deal on my iMac where I don’t run a huge number of apps, but a MAJOR issue on my already way-over-taxed MacBook Pro that I use for everything.
- I can’t use the camera for anything else. I use Skype all the time for video. I record screencasts and video using the camera. It seems like I have to shut FaceTime off in order to use the camera in another app… but then of course that means that people can’t call me using FaceTime.
Particularly for the second issue, this seems like a major FAIL to me. I asked about this on Twitter and loved this response from David Bryan:
- WHAT ABOUT WINDOWS? – Immediately after the announcement I had Windows-only friends asking “hey, what about us?” Yes, what about them? It’s the same kind of fractured platform strategy like Skype has had. Unlike Skype, Apple is one of the providers of an operating system, so they obviously want to provide as many incentives for people to come over into the Mac world. Still, it would be nice to have Windows interoperability.
- STANDARDS? – Which leads naturally to the last point… where is the open FaceTime specification? We know FaceTime is built on a number of open standards… but where is the specification that would allow other video endpoints to support FaceTime calls? Is it Apple’s goal to lock us in entirely to their products? C’mon Apple, lets get the spec out there so that other companies can support FaceTime and we can grow the video ecosystem!
Problems aside, it’s great to see FaceTime connections being possible to Macs. So far it’s worked quite well (outside of that turning off the video issue 🙂 )
What do you think? Have you tried out FaceTime for the Mac yet?
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Not yet. Thanks for this writeup!
Great review Dan – most useful.
I concur with you that the inability to diable the camera and associated processor sapping processes is an annoyance – I like you exist with an over-stretched MacBook Pro with an impossibly large number of applications open – so any app that hogs big chunks of my limited processor time is not good.
However – the existance of a high quality video capable client that interworks with excellent results with the iPhone 4 and iPod Touch 4G is truly wondrous. Whilst Skype video has been my main video app for the past couple of years, I can see me using a lot more FaceTime, as the ease of use coupled with the quality and portabilty of the platform make it hugely useful and attractive.
For all of it’s strengths, Skype really does not operate that well on mobile platforms – and the current inability to run Skype Video from a hand portable platform is a major limitation.
Great review Dan – most useful.
I concur with you that the inability to disable the camera and associated processor sapping processes is an annoyance – I like you exist with an over-stretched MacBook Pro with an impossibly large number of applications open – so any app that hogs big chunks of my limited processor time is not good.
However – the existance of a high quality video capable client that interworks with excellent results with the iPhone 4 and iPod Touch 4G is truly wondrous. Whilst Skype video has been my main video app for the past couple of years, I can see me using a lot more FaceTime, as the ease of use coupled with the quality and portabilty of the platform make it hugely useful and attractive.
For all of it’s strengths, Skype really does not operate that well on mobile platforms – and the current inability to run Skype Video from a hand portable platform is a major limitation.
One correction: You dont need to have FaceTime running to receive calls. The Apple Push Notification Framework (ApplePushService.framework) is running in the background so that you can receive calls without having the application itself open. You will find it in the Activity Monitor as process apsd-ft.
Apple FaceTime website states the same, btw: http://www.apple.com/mac/facetime/ (Under “Your Mac is ringing”)
Echoing the above comment: the only times you need to have the FaceTime application actually running are when you’re actively on a call or in the process of initiating one. The rest of the time: quit the app and forget about it. It automatically starts up when a call is received.
And regarding using the camera for other things: In the process of playing with FaceTime I discovered that Apple’s own applications will now happily share the camera with each other on my MBP. I can be recording video in QuickTime or Photo Booth (or even, it would seem, be using iChat, complete with video effects!) and accept a FaceTime call without missing a beat, and they all continue to receive video. Pretty impressive, really.
BUT, this doesn’t seem to extend to non-Apple apps; both Skype and Google’s Video chat plugin still require exclusive use of the camera. Clearly, Apple made some changes to the API for Snow Leopard… and either the camera-sharing is a private API feature or those others apps haven’t made the changes/updates needed to enable this camera-sharing, or are unwilling to relinquish more control of the camera to OS X in order to make it possible.
In cases where a non-sharing program is actively using the camera when a FaceTime call is received, the FaceTime app opens up but displays a message saying you can’t receive the call since the camera is in use, then quits. This message includes the raw phone number/email address for who’s calling you, but not a contact name, and the event is not entered into the Recent call log… although it almost definitely should show up as a missed call instead. Meanwhile, the person at the other end of the call just receives a standard “is not available for FaceTime” message.
It’s a decent start. I suppose if you want that call to trump whatever you were just doing with the camera, you can pause the other task and immediately call them right back… but Apple ought to smooth off some rough edges here to make this sort of call back more streamlined. Issues like this make it obvious why they’re calling it a beta.
Echoing the above comment: the only times you need to have the FaceTime application actually running are when you’re actively on a call or in the process of initiating one. The rest of the time: quit the app and forget about it. It automatically starts up when a call is received.
And regarding using the camera for other things: In the process of playing with FaceTime I discovered that Apple’s own applications will now happily share the camera with each other on my MBP. I can be recording video in QuickTime or Photo Booth (or even, it would seem, be using iChat, complete with video effects!) and accept a FaceTime call without missing a beat, and they all continue to receive video. Pretty impressive, really.
BUT, this doesn’t seem to extend to non-Apple apps; both Skype and Google’s Video chat plugin still require exclusive use of the camera. Clearly, Apple made some changes to the API for Snow Leopard… and either the camera-sharing is a private API feature or those others apps haven’t made the changes/updates needed to enable this camera-sharing, or are unwilling to relinquish more control of the camera to OS X in order to make it possible.
In cases where a non-sharing program is actively using the camera when a FaceTime call is received, the FaceTime app opens up but displays a message saying you can’t receive the call since the camera is in use, then quits. This message includes the raw phone number/email address for who’s calling you, but not a contact name, and the event is not entered into the Recent call log… although it almost definitely should show up as a missed call instead. Meanwhile, the person at the other end of the call just receives a standard “is not available for FaceTime” message.
It’s a decent start. I suppose if you want that call to trump whatever you were just doing with the camera, you can pause the other task and immediately call them right back… but Apple ought to smooth off some rough edges here to make this sort of call back more streamlined. Issues like this make it obvious why they’re calling it a beta.
Can anyone help please, Im not having a problem with the video on Face-time, the problem i have is with the audio, I have Facetime for MAC,and the person I takl with the most has an Ipad2, we connect just fine but after a short time aprox. 5 Min the person with the I pad cant here me, I can here them just fine. Any suggestions?
PING:
TITLE: UPDATE: Apple’s FaceTime for Mac – and shutting the video off
BLOG NAME: Disruptive Telephony
Silly me… I had forgotten Apple’s über-minimalist design philosophy. Moments after hitting “Publish” on my hands-on review of FaceTime for the Mac, my friend Stuart Henshall pointed out that the “problem” I listed of not being able to shut off…
I wasn’t able to get it to work perhaps because I don’t use MAC OS address book, I use entourage through MS Office. Interesting you got it to work. I saw many posts of people who were also not successful. I might try putting a few addresses in MAC address book and see if that helps. Thanks for post.