Leopard's iChat Theater Duplicates Script Software's iChatFX

iChatFX is a terrific utility that greatly expands the capability of iChat. According to Script Software,

Effects like bluescreen (which is capable of showing any movie, tv, video, or animation in the background of a video chat), twirl, comic book, alien, interrogation, pencil, vortex, dent, bump, bodyart, facepaint, fisheye, waking life, bubbles, mercury, on fire, ogre, sepia, sobel, xray, and many more, are included and any kind of special video effect can be created. Anything is now possible in iChat.

Sounds pretty similar to what Steve Jobs described yesterday as iChat Theater with Photo Booth. Of course, iChat Theater also will allow Keynote presentations and iPhoto slide shows over iChat as well.

Still, Script Software is very sanguine about the development that won't see daylight for another 6-9 month. Their response is:

Is it another case of Watson/Sherlock or Konfabulator/Dashboard or Windows/Mac?

Naw, we don’t think so. These aren't the days of Doug Engelbart inventing the mouse and desktop metaphors totally on his own. We are all connected by the net, articles, journals, sample code, and chat. Lots of brilliant minds all exchanging concepts. Like the independent creation of similar songs at the same time it is often hard to say where an idea originated. We are all connected, we stand on each others shoulders. In our case we had a leg up in creating what we did through the use of numerous Apple technologies that we put together in a creative way. ChatFX relies on Quartz Composer which is brilliant and created by Pierre-Olivier Latour, Apple gives it out free to developers. Also iChat was necessary and is free from Apple and part of the OS. We may have inspired Apple but Apple definitely inspired us.

Leopard from Apple is a good thing. We are Mac developers. We think the development and advancement of iChat and OS X is great for developers and users. We hope this note will clarify things from our point of view.

Leopard is not available till sometime next year but people can get ChatFX and use it right now. Apple’s future iChat Theatre will only work in iChat but we are working on making ChatFX work in Skype, Yahoo Messenger and any video app for more versatility then iChat Theatre which only works in iChat. More is coming, some things we can’t mention yet. Download and try it here: ChatFX

Apple’s attention on this area verifies and validates the usefulness of ChatFX to the future of video conferencing. We thank Apple and all the developers who are pushing back the frontier of knowledge in the area of telepresence.

As they wrote, iChatFX is available today. Check it out. [Bill Fox]