As you may or may not be aware, one of the features of Mac OS X Leopard is called iChat Theater. iChat Theater allows you to share arbitrary sound and video via AIM. The feature is great for end-users; showing a friend a funny movie clip, or your parents a photo album of your kid, has become wonderfully trivial. In what for Apple qualifies as a rare nod for developers, they have publicly exposed a clean API to allow your applications to hook into this framework. Basically, all an application must do is draw both to its window’s contentRect and to a contentRect provided by the framework. That’s it. All the other voodoo (NAT, quality scaling, firewall, and so on) is taken care of by the OS X IMService framework.
Unfortunately for us, one of the standard applications that Apple has hooked in is Remote Desktop, which means that users simply need to click a button and they can see another user’s screen. Again, because this uses IMService, Apple’s solution plows through NATs and firewalls and automatically rate-limits. When I first saw this on Monday, a friend of mine who is intimately involved with Leopard simply said, “Sorry. What can I say? It was a good idea.”
A couple of days sleep has helped me to distance myself a bit from the situation. Firstly, Leopard won’t come out until Spring next year, and the people who need help are the ones least likely to upgrade. So today, I went to the iChat Theater session to learn how this new system works.
The good and bad news is that Leopard’s remote assistance doesn’t actually use IMService. The reason that’s good is that, currently, remote control requires both parties have exposed public IP addresses with dropped firewalls, meaning that it has the same problems as MSN’s remote control. Although the developers have said that they intend to fix these problems by the final build, the fact that they’re not going through IMService, and that IMService took about three years to get it right, means that I’m not too worried they’ll actually get everything properly working. So that’s good.
The bad is that it means we won’t be able to hook into iChat the same way that they do. The public API is called IMAVService. IMAVService has no mechanism whatsoever to return input from the remote end. That makes it a complete nonstarter not only for us, but for many innovative ideas.
Despite Apple’s strong emphasis on resolution independence, the IMAVService framework caps presentation video at 320x240. The smallest display Apple sells right now is 1152x720—10 times as many pixels. The ratio they chose is also just bizarre; 320x240 is a 4:3 ratio, whereas all Apple displays are between 8:5 and 16:9, meaning that an awful lot of content has been optimized for letterbox-like displays while iChat Theater expects TV-like displays. Further, the entire thing ties into CoreVideo’s CVPixelBuffer in such a way that I seriously doubt they ever intend to support sending vector commands over the client. Combine all of these observations and it seems to me that iChat Theater is condemned to permanent blur-hell.
For the moment, I think it makes good sense not only to finish, but to continue work on Aardvark Mac. We’re cross-platform, we’ll work in situations where iChat probably won’t, and we’ll run on all Mac versions—not just Leopard. I still think it would be very wise to keep a very close eye on this technology in the future.
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