During the “Back to the Mac” event on Wednesday, Steve Jobs debuted the Facetime for Mac. Facetime was first introduced on iPhone 4. Later it was brought to the fourth generation of iPod touch. Now Apple has extended the Facetime feature to Mac users. With Facetime for Mac, you can make video calls with iPhone [...]
During the “Back to the Mac” event on Wednesday, Steve Jobs debuted the Facetime for Mac. Facetime was first introduced on iPhone 4. Later it was brought to the fourth generation of iPod touch. Now Apple has extended the Facetime feature to Mac users.
With Facetime for Mac, you can make video calls with iPhone 4 and iPod touch users right on your Mac. Of course, you can also establish video calls between two Macs over WiFi. Facetime is currently in beta version and available for free download from Apple. To use Facetime, you need to have an Intel Mac running Mac OS X 10.6.4 or up.
To use Facetime on Mac, you’ll need an Apple ID and register an email address. The email address is just like your phone number. When someone needs to reach you over Facetime, he/she can just place a call with your email address.
It’s very straightforward to initiate a call to your friend. FaceTime integrates with the Address Book on Mac and automatically loads up the contact list. You can simply select the contact and click on the number to start a Facetime call with an iPhone 4 user. If your friend is using an iPod touch or a Mac, you can place the call using the email address. Once your friend answers the Facetime call, you can talk to each other face-to-face.
From my preliminary test, the call quality is pretty good. Just like Facetime for iPhone, the Mac version also offers a picture-in-picture view so you can see how you look to the callee. One great feature that was highlighted by Steve Jobs during his demonstration in the “Back to the Mac” event, is that Facetime for Mac can automatically adjust the screen orientation. Say, if the person you’re calling turns his iPhone sideway, Facetime for Mac also adjusts the view from portrait to landscape. The application also allows you to establish the call in full-screen mode. You can just go to Video menu and select “Enter Full Screen” during the call.
You do not need to launch Facetime on Mac in order to receive calls. By default, Facetime runs in background and listens to any incoming calls. Whenever there is a FaceTime request, you can choose to answer it or simply hit the “Decline” button to reject the call. If you want to completely disable FaceTime, you can also go to the software’s Preference and turn off FaceTime.
As mentioned by Steve Jobs, Apple has shipped 19 million FaceTime-compatible devices. FaceTime for Mac is a great tool for you to easily make video calls with friends owning iOS devices. The software is currently in beta. So far, it works pretty great and I do not find any major issue. One complaint about the software, however, is it just supports Mac OS X 10.6.4 or up. I’m sure there are quite a large number of Mac users who are still using the Leopard OS (i.e. 10.5.x). If you meet the minimum requirement of the software, go ahead to download FaceTime for Mac and try it out yourself.
To see how FaceTime for Mac works, check out the demo video:
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