Broken Hive Mind

Ok so before I get going here I have not updated to 10.6 yet, after all of the problems I experienced with critical applications after the 10.4 to 10.5 switch (not on my own machine but on others, I had enough sense to make a separate partition to test 10.5 with first. Many of the Apple users demand an upgrade to the newest OS no matter what it will do to their stuff btw, the logic on that eludes me.) I decided to wait a bit. Sure 10.6 is actually a reasonable price for once, but that’s probably because it’s just what 10.5 should have been in the first place if Crapple didn’t panic and release 10.5 before it was really ready because of Vista, or whatever. Anyway, OSX used to be alot more into proudly claiming their open source roots than they are now. One of the things that many webcam manufacturers have gotten behind is the UVC standard for cams which Apple claims to support which they do but only sort of. This allows the most systems to support the most cameras. Let me stop and say congrats to Logitech for supporting this as much as possible. The manufacturers have provided a simple standard that allows their USB webcams to work on almost all machines. It works on my Ubuntu machine, it works on my Windows machine, and it works, oh wait it doesn’t work on my Apple even though Apple supposedly supports the UVC standard. That’s why there is no driver for it. It is just supposed to work, but oh yeah it doesn’t, but I have an iSight built in so it won’t be an issue right? Well now we get into the frustrating part and provide some more technical specifics. My family wants to communicate with me via webcam. Since most of them just surf the web I am not going to recommend a Crapple to most of them unless they just love Crapple, have used it before, are just dangerous around a computer, etc. because it is just too expensive for what they want to do. Sure Apple’s do some things better than other computers but most users don’t need to do those things and that is another post in itself. Anyway, I tested my Quickcam Communicate MP in Ubuntu with Pidgin, no dice, with Kopete, worked fine with MSN protocol. Of course I tried many protocols including Yahoo, MSN, AIM, and Jabber. I did not try Google talk. I guess I should but since I’m paying for an iSight just to have open source save my ass in the end I got kind of annoyed. This is pretty typical though. Sure if I was an incompetent CIO I would have just spent 60 grand on some system to manage all of this, then demand that everyone else use that, or some shit but I’m smart enough not to do things like that. The problem was simple. This is an area where the companies are battling it out over protocols, and ultimately control of what we will use with the systems we own. Anyway, I downloaded MSN Messenger for OSX since iChat doesn’t support this as one of its built in protocols, guess what, MSN on Mac doesn’t support the built in iSight camera and since the Communicate MP doesn’t work I tried an old Firewire camera I had. MSN Messenger basically said sorry, but we expect to have full camera support in our next version. Ok on to Windows, no problems here after I installed the Quickcam drivers, but I still couldn’t really communicate using a cam with the Crapple. Skype seems to work with everything, but it really doesn’t provide optimal performance. The point I’m getting to here is that there are some 3rd party companies that release broader webcam support for the Apple, perhaps 10.6 has better UVC support, etc. but the real problem was iChat, the built in iSight, and companies deciding what they will try to make you use. What the hell is the built-in iSight good for other than communicating with other Apple users that have built-in iSights and iChat (the old firewire iSights are pretty awesome btw, but that’s not what I’m taking about here). Then it dawned on me. That’s all that it is for. From Apple’s point of view why is anyone trying to use anything other than iChat anyway? Microsoft wonders why they try to use anything but Windows (pick a version) messenger, but at least MS has taken steps to provide a Messenger for Mac with better camera support, sure it isn’t out yet because this wasn’t a foreseeable problem j/k but at least they’re starting to wake up. Lower end UVC cameras are not supported well at least up through 10.5 on the Apple because they don’t seem to be too worried about them, and then not in many applications and now we can start to pass the blame around to the companies that provide messengers with fewer features on one OS than another. The list of supported cameras that work on the Apple are usually very expensive when compared to the Communicate MP and similar models. The point I’m getting to here is if we’re going to include the iSight as such a proprietary device and lock it down to a few programs let’s not lie to people and sell them Macs with the claim that they have a built in iSight. Yeah technically they do, but it’s not worth much if you work in a real environment with many different computers. Perhaps they can give you a credit towards purchasing a real webcam to use with your Mac. I don’t know. All I know is that by the time I was done I could do everything I wanted to from Linux to Linux and Linux to Windows with affordable hardware using UVC on Linux with good performance, but not using Apple’s UVC implementation. Again Skype worked on all after some fiddling. I tried Yahoo messenger, MSN Messenger, iChat and some open source variants on the Apple. I could almost always get text chat, but not camera support even with the firewire cam on the Apple. Again, I did find a way around it in the end, I’m just using the cam with my Laptop (Ubuntu/Windows) or I can get some of the users to go to iChat, but I guess that I’m annoyed that this issue is so complex for something that should be so simple. Instead I feel like users are being hearded into using one protocol or another with one hardware set or another so that companies can try to corner us into their products. Sure iChat is pretty impressive when Macs are all talking to each other, but when is Apple going to learn that fully implementing open source standards that they use is good for them, and that they don’t have a large enough percentage of the market to be jerks? Fighting that only makes people not want to buy Apple’s again, and when they buy their $120, instead of $30, webcam that’s OSX approved so they can use it with more than iChat they feel ripped off and lied to because they have been. Sure techs can find some ways around these problems, but the average user doesn’t buy an Apple to deal with these problems. The overall point is that problems like this leads some idiots that run IT departments to demand all Windows, or all OSX environments, but the truth is that if I had all Ubuntu machines with Ubuntu approved webcams I would have had no problems either. Sticking to one kind of machine plays right into the companies hands and rewards them for making simple problems complex. If I have a camera built into my computer I should be able to use it with any major chat program to connect to anyone else using a similar client with full video and audio support. The camera manufacturers have done their best to make this possible so if Apple and MS are fighting them than what else are they fighting, and should we really be spending money with them? Anyway, that last point is a whole other post. Still MS and Ubuntu came out way ahead of Apple on this one.