Up until today, our home webcam was an old eBay find: an rca-input cam, if you can believe that. I've been running it off my PowerMac 7600, a machine on the verge of a hard drive breakdown if ever I've heard one. Having rca inputs built-in to the 7600 is a selling point that you never heard much about in those days - this was well before Steve Jobs decided that Making Stupid Home Movies was to be the primary purpose of consumer Macs. I certainly gave those ports a lot of use over the years, grabbing video freeze frames for my card games chief among them. The 7600 is still active - for the moment. She's holding my old SCSI scanner and even older laser printer.

But back to the iSight (a pun I didn't get until just today, as a matter of fact.) Since it's Apple-made for Apple products, it obviously works instantly and perfectly. It certainly throws a better image than any other webcam I've used... as you can see by clicking between my home (iSight) and work (Logitech QuickCam) webcams. And like all Apple products, buying one is like buying expensive cosmetics; the item itself just looks cool, and the packaging is stylish and well designed. But, for $150, the thing is dangerously under-featured.

To read Apple's press, the iSight is solely for use with iChat AV, Apple's in-process video conferencing/chatting software. In fact, the iSight itself comes with no software at all, no install cd of any kind. Step 1 in the instructional manual is to download iChat AV from Apple's website. It's quite possible that the iChat AV installation secretly adds the necessary drivers to OSX, but it doesn't mention it and I didn't try using the iSight before loading iChat AV, so who knows. Regardless, a firewire OSX cam is a firewire OSX cam, so third party software will be able to take advantage of it.

For example, the ftp software I had to find in order to have the iSight take a periodic picture and upload it to fourhman.com's massive high-security double-duelie linux servers hidden deep in Silicon Valley. Since Apple provided no such ftp solution, I have to spend another $20 to find my own.

It's plain this is a first generation piece of hardware, sadly. I just know Apple will debut the iSight 2 within the next twelve months, to much hoopla and rejoicing. For one thing, the iSight's supplied camera bases are incredibly limiting (which is partially a problem with the ball joint that connects the cam to the stand.) You get three differently-shaped plastic stands, each supposedly for a separate Mac monitor design. One of which is an interesting clip-on number with a tightening screw, intended for laptops. The other two are just stands with either a horizontal base or a vertical base... with sticky on the bottom. Yes, Apple intends you to actually stick these plastic goobers directly onto the back of your flatpanel monitor or the top of your eMac tube monitor. The fuck I will. I want my cam to be able to move around: sitting on my desk one day, pointing out the window the next. Under no circumstances will it be hot-glued to my precious iMac monitor.

And the camera offers very little range of motion. You get less than 90 degrees movement left-to-right, and only a little more up-and-down. Getting the iSight off of the base is another problem; you need to crack the cam itself off of the firewire cable, and then dis-assemble the strange firewire plug sleeve to be able to snake the firewire out of the stand's tube. This thing is screaming for a better stand design, and I'm sure the third party developers are already working on it. Another worrisome problem is that you can't do anything with the iSight itself. No zoom, the focus is all auto, not even an opaque shield to block its view. You can close the shutter with a stiff click of the end ring, that's it.

It just says to me that Apple has no (current) intention of making this a full-purpose webcam - like every other cam out there, freakin' goddammit. For the moment, this is purely a tool for the iChat AV beta test. You affix it to your monitor roof, point it at your -$150 face, and Jetson-talk to somebody else inside Apple's 2-4% market share.

Let's talk about iChat. iChat is Apple's homegrown instant messenging app, an app that would have no chance of widespread acceptance did it not integrate with existing AOL Instant Messenger accounts. (I suppose at any point they could pull the AIM compatibility and only allow .Mac accounts, making iChat truly a Mac Users Only world... just like America Online used to be!) Given: like all Apple-made programs, it looks better than AIM... and there's no advertising or annoying stock ticker/news ticker features. iChat AV also has a great interface for making a buddy icon, and it works seamlessly with the rest of OSX.

But it's missing some pretty basic stuff that shows that Apple hasn't the first clue how people use instant messenging. First of all, the thing is desperate to fully sync up with your OSX Address Book... so if your Address Book includes your contacts' AIM screen names, iChat will list your buddies according to their real name, not their screen names. I suppose you could prefer seeing real names, but I don't. For one thing, it trains you not to know your friends' screen names, which doesn't help you any should you use IM on anybody else's computer. And, more importantly, if one buddy runs multiple screen names, iChat will list that person once, no matter how many screen names are currently signed on. This bothers me quite a bit because I use five different screen names, one for each computer I use (home Mac, home PC, work Mac, work PC, Hiptop)... this way I can tell which ones are on, which ones have crashed, and just be generally anal about things. Under iChat, all of my names appeared under one "Joe Fourhman" heading. And I have no idea which machine received any IMs sent to that name. To fix this, I had to break my own Address Book entry so that it didn't associate all of my screen names to one person.

Chatting in iChat is something of an acquired taste. The text chat window right justifies your text, and left justifies your buddy's, as if you're both talking within a comic strip panel. This looks cute at first - with pretty colored word balloons eminating from buddy icons - but that's not how people read. When you read a book, everything is left justified; reading right justified text is difficult for the western eye. All of this design gets in the way of actually using and reading your IMs. Thanks to all the spacing and justification, the scrollback gets overly large even on the shortest conversations.

iChat also doesn't understand the usage of buddy folders. All your buddies are amalgamated into one big list, organized alphabetically (or by availability.) Again, you may prefer this, but if you have a long buddy list it becomes a chore to navigate because you can't group anything. (And if you're like me, you have a buddy folder of screen names that are mere online acquaintances, and you'd rather not have them get in the way of your real buddies.) iChat AV does offer a sad grouping feature, but get this: the folders only indicate which buddies you see in your list. Turn on the Co-Workers group folder and all your Co-Workers mingle right back in with your Buddies... with no distinction at all. I always thought AIM's folder-based buddy window was distinctly Mac-like in origin, so I find it ironic that Apple's own iChat has this stupid, unnavigable setup. (To further the pain, the only way to turn groups on or off is through the menu bar or hidden keystroke, not through any button in the iChat window itself.)

The good news is that iChat AV is still in beta, so anything can happen... although most of my complaints have been there since the first release, gurmble grumble. I'm sure Apple will continue to improve iChat. (The video conferencing is a great addition, but for all of Steve Jobs' Developers' Conference bluster, video conferencing has been commonplace on computers for years. Apple should have created this iteration years ago.) I just consider AIM's features the absolute baseline, and Apple's version really ought to deliver everything Mac AIM can do, plus more features and the wholesome, integrated Mac design.