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  • Hacker News
  • SNATMAP is essentially Apple's version of STUN (RFC 3489, also 2003): learn your public IP and port from an outside server, swap them over chat, then both sides send packets at once to punch through NAT. That's why port-preserving NAT matters. Carrier-grade NAT, common on mobile and some ISPs, assigns a new port per destination and breaks it. Modern WebRTC falls back to a TURN relay, but iChat had none, so if calls still fail after the hosts fix, check for CGNAT on either end.
    by mulanroo
  • This is awesome! I remember trying to figure out how this worked as a kid, and never made headway. Today my dream was realized. ;)
    by jadar
  • A time warp to when video conferencing actually worked, as opposed to every new release of FaceTime now being some kind of avant-garde art experiment with the UI being increasingly impossible to use for both technical and non-technical users.

    The last straw for me was making the recents/contacts as confusing as it was, and I personally made some accidental calls to former contacts that for some reason were made front and center.

    I expect the next version will hide even more controls behind a new, indecipherable icon that looks like a 2D abstract pair of testicles.

    by penskymaterial
  • A few years ago I bought that iSight camera off eBay for no good reason, especially as I can't really use it. It's just a beautiful object to own.
    by dewey
  • I’ll still take that UI 1000x over Golden Gate.
    by JSR_FDED
  • That overengineered isight camera worked through multiple adapters up until the introduction of the M1, when they sadly finally removed the driver. I used to use it connected to my intel macbook pro for meetings in the the late 2010s for fun.
    by jd3
  • > Then at Apple's World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) in June of 2003, along with the G5 processor and OS X 10.3 panther, Apple announced "iChat AV".

    This is wonderful. I love that people are still using this!

    I worked on iChat AV video. We also added 4-way video conferencing with H.264 support in 2004. Really did feel cutting edge back then. Lots of all-nighters in those days, hand-writing altivec and hand-optimizing h.264 to work on iMacs and iBooks that didn’t have simd..

    by rajbot

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