You know, I still have no clue what the “i” is supposed to stand for after all this time.

Anyway, the new iChat A/V is impressive. I’ve already had a voice-only conversation with a college buddy and on a whim I plugged in my digital camcorder via firewire and found that it just worked. I was able to use the camera with iChat with no configuration. Nice! On the downside, my friend who was audio only was not able to see my video stream. He could only do audio. Maybe there’s a setting you need to hit to accept video. I hope so. If the software limits you so that you can only receive video if you also send it, that’s a waste.

As for the iSight camera? Major covet. And Panther looks pretty cool as well. Though I cannot believe Apple is going to make us shell out another $129 per computer yet again.

Finally, I was bummed that a problem I had with Safari in beta still exists in the new 1.0 version. Of course, I’ve never heard of anyone else having this problem so maybe it’s me. Whenever I open the second tab, it freezes. If I turn off tabbing and go with just windows, it works fine. I trashed all settings files I could find except my bookmarks and still had the problem. Maybe I’ll trash the bookmarks also and see what happens… maybe not… If the new version actually works with the bank web site and a few others my wife needs to survive, she may actually switch to it full time. I already have. And I’m glad it’s GM now. I can actually start designing websites with it specifically in mind. (I never wanted to commit to doing anything special to support it when I knew it may well change how it behaved). In fact, I need to go and see how some of the issues I had before appear now…