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iChat 4.0
Posted January 16th, 2007, in Apple, OS X.
So, iChat. I personally think it’s the greatest instant messaging client out there, bar none. It achieves this great sense of simplicity and integration with the rest of OS X and has so many smart ideas in it.
For those of you not in the know, it’s often ignored on the OS X platform in favour of Adium, a multi-network free IM app specifically for the Mac, without the audio\video features but with more comprehensive IM-related features. I believe Adium and iChat are perfect examples of the difference between corporate and open-source UI design ideas. Both are polished and nice, but Adium overflows with features and buttons and choices, while iChat restricts you to what Apple thought was best. In my mind, iChat wins out overwhemingly as far as user experience goes, and it has done so many more innovative things with even rudimentary UI features like “tabs”: In iChat 4.0 (Leopard iChat) you get this slick sidebar that’s far more informative and usable than the plain Adium draggable tabs.
Anyway, since this is one of my favourite applications that seems to get all the fundmentals “right”, I have some ideas on how to make it perfect.
First, this is how the app looks in Leopard. You’ll note they ditched brushed metal, which is something I feel a little bad about (I hate brushed metal and any UI design besides standard 10.3-era pinstriped Aqua, but iChat was one app I felt metal was useful in), but it’s largely the same as the old one. Just little refinements around the place.
Here are the things I think Apple should consider adding to this wonderful base application:
General changes
- Skype, MSN and Yahoo support. MSN and Yahoo can be rudimentary, I don’t mind. File sends, avatars and plain old messaging should suffice. Skype, however, should be a strategic partnership in order to promote iChat’s audio and visual features, right now useless except if you are only friends with other Mac fags. Skype video and audio should work identically to iChat video and audio, enabling Mac->PC connections that aren’t crappy like the limited AIM support we have now.
- Higher quality voice chat. Like, on iChat->iChat video\audio chat. Right now it sounds hideous. I expect Apple to be the first ones to at least introduce high quality audio chat, which will adjust to use all of my 25kb\s bandwidth to send high quality sound similar to a high bitrate AAC. Skype is good in this respect, but iChat could be better.
Contact List
- Unified contact list. There is no need for a separate window for each service. Everything should be consolidated into one window, and even if a user has 20 active usernames spanning all five services, they should show as one entry in the list. It only makes sense.
- Smart Groups. Why not? It’d be cool if you could create a group for your contacts with a set of conditions based on the address card information like “Business is ‘Microsoft’”, or other metadata like “Last spoke in the last seven days”, etc. Catch up with friends you’ve ignored in a “People I rarely speak to” group? All sorts of clever ideas could be done.
- Personal RSS feed. (Pictured above) You should be able to add an RSS feed (or two) for each person on your list, which would correspond to their blog or other personal content. It would work similarly to how recent versions of MSN do on Windows - you get a little icon that pops up when people update their MSN blog, but this way you could use standard RSS feeds from anywhere to monitor a journal.
- Local Clocks. (Pictured above) Skype does this but not as well as it should. I believe it’d be neat if each person with a known time zone should have a little clock next to their name, with a pretty colour theme that indicates the general time of day - morning, afternoon, dusk or nighttime, say with a sunset or moon or whatever. I don’t think the AIM network provides this information, however iChat should aggressively try and find the information out, through checking on alternate networks (if the person uses Skype, it will know), the listed location in their address book card, or if that fails, a traceroute next time the person sends a file or uses IM image connection. Why not? Computers can do this for you!
Instant Message Window
Several things.
Intelligent image resizing
We don’t live in a perfect world. Many people use AIM 4 or 5 on the PC, which chokes on huge images like photos. iChat should notice that they’re not using iChat, and that an image you’re sending is pretty big, and offer to resize it to something sensible for them.
Useful feedback when sending images
I wasn’t able to make this as pretty as I wanted, but it’s one idea.. why not have the image display in a blurred state, or greyscale, and slowly fill in and the file sends? At least put a status bar on it. Right now it’s impossible to tell when a file has sent on iChat and yet it will bitch at you if you try to send a message while it’s still working in the background. Oh, it should also store all the messages you type and images you send and transparently send them through as soon as it can.
Additional in-window notifications
Pretty self explanatory, right? “This user is currently offline, message may not be delivered” is one other obvious idea. Or “This user is away”. Even “This message is long, a direct IM will be attempted.” But we can do more with it…
Integrated image hosting
Do you see what I did there? Apple should make their own ImageShack-like service and have iChat send an inline image as a simple link to a temporary uploaded file. iChat should do this when it can tell that the user cannot accept direct IMs (this is a feature of the AIM network, easy to do), if iChat determines the user to have a history of failed direct IMs (firewall issues) or if the user is marked in their info panel to use this function. It’d make so many potential headaches disappear. It could be marked out in a pretty way with a thick border and caption mentioning that it was uploaded to Apple and was represented as a link to the other user.
For long bouts of text that are too big for direct IM or a single IM, this should also be uploaded to an Apple-run temporary holding space. No more worrying about huge logs!
Stored Notes
Firstly, I apologise for the ugly mockup and the stupid name. I couldn’t think of any better that readily came to mind - Apple could fix that.
Basically, this feature is like ICQ’s network. Remember how on ICQ you could send an IM to an offline user, and the next time they signed on they’d see your message pop up? (Uh-oh!) iChat should do that. I think Skype supports this already, and if AIM doesn’t, it should perhaps store them with an Apple-run AIM bot that forwards messages to people. (If you send to iChat, though, it should be made transparent and appear as if it was sent from a particular user so you can respond to them straight away.)
iChat Profiles
I think the profile “Get Info” window needs reworking. It’s bad in iChat 3 and looks all wrong in iChat 4 - kinda like an address book contact, I think. I think it should be a big overbearing Aqua window like above.
We need a big avatar image to look at, and a pretty way of showing idle times, online times, their time and location, as well as support for Skype, AIM, MSN etc. There’s not much to say about the example above that you can’t already see.
Here’s a few more interesting things. We keep the event stuff, which is useful, but we add options for the uploading to Apple, an RSS field, manual timezone selection field (if we hate what iChat figured out itself from their address card, traceroute etc) and a preferred IM service for when a person is on multiple services at once. I’d pick AIM, but you see Skype there. It’s cool.
Other bits and pieces
- Show the last 5-10 IMs sent and received in a greyed out way. Many clients do this including Adium. iChat should too, it’s useful and a no-brainer if you have a client that keeps logs.
- Animate files being dragged to the window in a pleasing way. Why not a water droplet where you put it? Even just a big blue highlight? Right now it doesn’t feel satisfying to drop stuff on an iChat window when it should be made second nature.
- If you drag a contact to the window from address book or the buddy list, a drop-down window should appear asking you if you want to “Paste as” a home address, work address, email address, IM, etc.
- If you drag an event from iCal, it should paste details of the event.
I think all that should make iChat pretty great. Of course, there’s more polishing to do, stability issues, etc.. but I think a lot of these ideas would be considered innovative and useful in a way that other chat clients haven’t approached yet. Doubt it’ll happen.
I still like iChat 4, though.
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