I’m flying Virgin America from BOS to SFO, and apparently all their planes on that route offer in-flight internet via Gogo. $12.95 buys 3Mbps down and 300Kbps up (at least early on when nobody else seemed to be using it). I can get my iPhone online for only 8 bucks, but as far as I can tell, I’d have to buy two plans if I wanted to use both on this flight.

I resisted the urge to try video chat, but I’m glad Adam didn’t. The novelty was apparently enough to bring most of the team into his office to see. The results are above. Adam says my video stream was better than it appears above for most of the conversation. Still, my efforts at pointing the camera out the window were mostly futile.

Aside from the turbulence, it’s been mostly like a day in the office. I read email, I do a little bit of coding…. I somehow don’t think I’ll bother with this on the way back (though I will appreciate the power outlets that let me charge my computer while listening to the larger music collection).

Google yesterday introduced video chat to the web-based version of it’s Google Talk app (think GMail), but doesn’t appear to interoperate with any of the many existing video chat apps, iChat and Skype tops among them.

Among the missing features I hear the most complaints about regarding iChat is the lack of tabbed chatting. Today I discovered it’s part of Leopard. Simply go to the iChat prefs, click on the messages pane, and selected “Collect chats into a single window” and you’re set.

With rumors of a March release of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, swirling, Zach asked what was promised that he should be excited about, so I went looking to jog my memory.

The announced features include Time Machine automatic backup of all your stuff (with integration to make finding and restoring stuff in applications easy and sweet, watch the video already), as well as a big leap ahead for iChat. The news isn’t that iChat finally supports multiple logins, visibility, or animated icons, or even the fancy backdrops or other goodies in the video chat. No, the big news for iChat is “iChat Theater,” described here in Apple’s developer announcement:

Instant messaging has become an essential tool for users to communicate and collaborate. In Leopard, the ability to collaborate has been taken to a new level. In an iChat session, users will be able to use iChat Theatre to present data from another application, such as iPhoto or Keynote, as part of a video conference. The applications you create will also be able to integrate with iChat in the same way using the Instant Messaging framework via the Core Video and Core Audio APIs. Once integrated, the Instant Messaging framework will automatically compress the content, using the H.264 codec, and send it across the network to the remote user’s display.

From the looks of it, iChat Theater will be compatible with any IM client and network that supports video chat, including AIM.

Hey, note also that first line where they call IM an “essential tool.”

iChat Theater, IM, Leopard, Mac OS Leopard, Mac OS X, Mac OS X 10.5, iChat, instant messaging

As I was contemplating making angry calls to my hosting provider last week when they shut down MaisonBisson for a couple days, it occurred to me that I would rather make those calls via SkypeOut or some similar service that didn’t reveal my home phone number. After all, I wouldn’t want an angry sysop to take revenge by having a spare modem call me up every 27 minutes between the hours of midnight and seven AM.

I’m ashamed to admit that it was at that moment that I decided to buy a Bluetooth headset. Trust me, I’d been thinking about it for a while and I had other, good uses in mind, but that was the moment.

My Logitech Mobile Freedom Bluetooth Headset arrived Saturday, but I only tried to pair a few moments ago.

You can probably imagine my shock when the OS X Bluetooth Setup Assistant told me my hardware didn’t support headsets. As it turns out, I hadn’t bothered to install the Bluetooth firmware update, released all the way back in November 2004. The big clue arrived in this MacDevCenter article about Bluetooth headsets and OS X.

But with the Bluetooth update installed, I quickly paired the headset with my 15“ aluminum PowerBook and was able to configure iChat to use it. None of my logged-in buddies were audio chat enabled, though, so I ambled over to Gizmo Project, a VOIP app similar to Skype. I was making calls in no time, and the recorded conversations reveal good sound quality from both ends of the call.

Then, with a change in the OS X System Preferences app, I was routing all audio output to the headset and listening to iTunes. Audio quality with music sounded like 22 KHz, but I didn’t buy this monophonic headset to listen to music.

tags: bluetooth, bluetooth firmware update, bluetooth headset, bluetooth headsets, gizmo project, gizmoproject, ichat, logitech, logitech mobile freedom, mac os x, mobile, skype, wireless

My friend Will was in meetings all day Friday, and there are few better times to have SMS messaging than in meetings. Thing is, I didn’t want to type on my phone’s numeric keypad when I had my computer in front of me, so I went looking for the details of this old hint that describes how to send SMS messages with iChat (would also work with any AIM client).

But there are other solutions. Slipstick lists the email addresses for various networks’ email to SMS gateways. And, obviously, most networks have web forms to send SMSs. Here’s Verizon’s.

This leads to a few questions. In these days of number portability, how can a person identify the carrier for a particular phone number based on the number alone? Will these web and email to SMS gateways work for off-network numbers (i.e. will Nextel’s gateway send SMS to Sprint?)? Is there another network agnostic gateway besides the AIM service identified above?

About the picture: there are a number of entertaining sms-tagged photos on Flickr.

tags: aim client, aim to sms, email to sms, ichat, mobile text, send sms messages, sms, sms gateway, sms gateways, sms messaging, texting, web to sms