The Mac office: Picturing a better way to communicate
An AT&T commercial from 1993 asked, among other things, “Have you ever tucked your baby in from a phone booth?” We see a mother making a video call to her child in a public phone booth, and the voice-over assures us, “You will.”
Twenty years ago, the vision for video calling in the future was that it would be universal—and as simple and interoperable as telephones. Now we all have cameras built into our Macs, iPhones, and iPads, and maybe even our TVs. And it is indeed possible to buy a device called a videophone. Video communication is commonplace, but the problem is that there are dozens of competing systems, services, and protocols. Whichever one of these you choose on a given occasion may or may not work for the party on the other end. And if two people have several options to choose from, figuring out which works best can be an exercise in frustration.
Because I work at home and my colleagues and clients are scattered around the world, I regularly rely on video for meetings, presentations, demos, and other business get-togethers. So I have software installed, and accounts set up, for Facebook Video Calling, FaceTime, Google+ Hangouts, Messages, Skype, and a few others services—each on several different devices. And yet, I rarely have a truly satisfactory voice- or video-chat experience. Nearly every time someone wants to conduct a video call with me, we have to go through multiple rounds of negotiation and fiddling, and even then something often goes wrong.
Hello? Can you hear me?
In Messages, you can use more than one protocol with the same account—for example, you might use a mac.com address with both iMessages and AIM. The choice matters because different protocols have different features.
If I want to have a plain, one-on-one video call with someone, nearly any service will work. But, if one party or the other wants to share a computer’s screen, our choices narrow. (FaceTime and Facebook are out, for example.) If I want the other party to see my face and all or part of my screen at the same time—as I do, for example, when delivering a remote video presentation to a user group—I have even fewer options. And if we want more than two parties to be involved in the conversation, yet another set of constraints kicks in.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
http://www.macworld.com/article/2044596/the-mac-office-picturing-a-better-way-to-communicate.html#tk.rss_all
