Apples priorities? lack of polish on ichat ? except perhaps the icon !
No sooner do they add a feature to the operating system, they then fail to update it. Logged on to ichat again recently and tried to have a chat between me and a friend. I had just about forgotten about the troubles I had setting ichat up 5 years ago so I thought it might be worth a try today, only to discover similar flaws to the ones I experienced 5 years ago. Joy joy for whatever reasons we spent an hour and a half trying to make the heap of shit software behave and then gave up.  ichat v4.0.8 on both sides.
Initially I knew he was logged on but it perceived him to be offline. Resolved that issue by recreating him as a buddy or something, then he could hear me but I couldnt hear him. Then set up tons of port forwarding on the router including trying dmz my own machine. Still couldnt hear the other guys voice. He could see his own voice input on the meter though. Could have been his router, although I went through setting up all the port forwarding on his machine GRRR to no avail. I could screen share to him but not the reverse ? Also my machine kernel panicked with a grey screen of death crash with my dual monitor setup when he was controlling my machine and the pointer wandered onto the second screen, GRR .
Then I thought maybe I have to upgrade to a mobileme account from my dotmac acct which was still functioning from a buddy list point of view in ichat. So I signed up for a free trial entered in my card details blah blah blah. Did it then function any better with both of us on mobileme accounts ? No not at all, all the issues were the same.
Answer – ichat is still a pretty poor program. Why is it they plough all this new investment into new stuff and features and yet they can barely maintain the stuff they’ve already written ?
ichat is still a dog in comparison to skype, and why oh why is spotlight and file searching still an absolute dog in mac os x ? no control whatsoever in that department.
Apple your priorities are all wrong. Get it together man, why the hell should I pay you £59.99 a year when I cant even get ichat to function properly, let alone syncing issues with multiple users on a single account ? As I know from trying to support it from an IT perspective is a nightmare. All this apple mobileme stuff seems to break if you fall out of some small ill defined parameters setup by apple.
