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You have a Mac; they have a PC. What IM software will let you type, talk, see, and send across the Great Divide?

The IM phenomenon

According to Wikipedia:

An instant messenger is a computer application which allows instant text communication between two or more people through a network such as the Internet.

This definition accurately describes the situation in the 1990s, but the phenomenon that is instant messenging (IM) today is much broader than the exchange of realtime text messages.

Type

Good old-fashioned typing still has its uses, and it doesn't require much in the way of bandwidth or processing power. Perhaps the main advantage is that you don't have to think about a reply in realtime as on the telephone—but nor do others wait hours or days for your e-mailed reply. Typing gives you time to think of a suitable and reasoned reply (with spell checking!)—without being put on the spot or having to endure an uncomfortable silence. It's also very easy to copy-and-paste a URL or other information into a chat window.

Talk

Sometimes, as BT say, "it's good to talk". Voice calls can be made PC to PC and North to South hemisphere for no additional communications cost, even if both parties have 56K modem access. Broadband is better of course, but even then call quality can be variable. Getting this to work from behind your firewall and/or NAT router can pose something of a challenge.

See

If talk is good, then talk with moving pictures must be better, right? Sure, it is nice to "see" new family members you haven't yet seen in the flesh, but preferably not in your dressing gown prior to the first morning coffee. And the extra strain that pictures put on your bandwidth can make for pretty choppy sound. But it's relatively new technology and if you're prepared to tolerate voice delays and images made up of blurry jerking moving shapes, give it a try. If both parties have broadband and expensive cameras the experience is likely to be a lot easier on the eye—or not, depending on who's in front of the camera ;-)

Send

There are a number of reasons why you might want to send a file by IM rather than e-mail. The most obvious are that the recipient receives it instantly (e-mail delivery can be delayed) and that some e-mail accounts restrict the maximum size of file attachments: sending a high resolution digital photo, for example, can be a problem.

What client?

What free IM client could you install on your Mac to make sure you can experience the full breadth of IM? That depends to some extent on what client the person you are calling has installed. Assuming your contact has a PC (as contacts often do) and can install any client you request (preferably also free), which of the various Mac and Windows IM clients play nice together? I spent some time and effort testing them out:

The clients

• Skype (Mac, PC)
• Fire (Mac)
• AIM (Mac, PC)
• MSN Messenger (Mac) or Windows Messenger (Win)
• Yahoo! Messenger (Mac, PC)
• iChat (Mac)
• Trillian (PC)

Notes about the table

• The matrix above is not an exhaustive list of clients or services.
• Some Windows clients (e.g. Trillian) are the equivalent of Fire on the Mac and allow you use one client to manage several services.
• (1) Trillian Pro, although not free, does permit voice and video calls to iChat using your AIM account (the AIM - iChat combo can strangely do video, but not audio alone!). I got voice calls working, although only after shutting down the firewall on my Mac and router; I was not able to test video.
• (2) See here for information about Messenger Service pop-ups.
• (3) Allows cross-platform webcam images, but without audio (although I couldn't get a Mac to receive webcam images from a PC).
• Some clients feature adverts for products not related to messenging services. As a case in point I would not willingly install AIM on anyone's PC. In fact AIM would not install unless I disabled Microsoft Antispyware first; it then launched multiple pop-up ads; the interface is a nightmare. Both AIM and Yahoo! Messenger make a determined effort to take over your PC, trying to set themselves or related products as your default homepage, search engine, IM client, etc. I don't like this sort of behaviour.
• Caveat: Although a client may claim to support file transfer, getting this to work behind a NAT firewall can be tricky. You may need to adjust your firewall/ router settings to enable particular services (e.g. for Messenger).

The pros and cons of Skype

For a review of Skype, see here and here. For the moment I'm not interested in the SykpeOut facility (for placing calls to regular telephones). These are the things that stand out for me.

First, the pros

• It is, by far, the easiest service to sign up for with the most usable interface.
• Skype is cross-platform with almost (but not quite) the same feature set.
• File transfer actually works - without your having to tear out your firewall or hair.
• Calling and accepting calls works as it should, with no firewall/ NAT router fiddling to do beforehand (but see "Online status" below).
• Call quality broadband to broadband is excellent; broadband to narrowband is sometimes acceptable (and can occur with less delay than a UK-NZ telephone call!).
• There are no adverts.
• Communications are apparently encrypted.
• It works with the Plantronics DSP-300 headset I already had; see tip below.

Cons with your chips, Sir?

• My parents had "Phone our boathouse" show up in their Contacts List. They don't have a boathouse... Whatever Skype say, this means that there ARE valid privacy concerns.
• My online status is not always correctly reported to my contacts; sometimes I have to sign out then in again so they can "see" me.
• Call quality broadband to narrowband is sometimes unacceptable; several times we've needed to give up and pick up the conventional telephone.
• You can't take your contacts list with you when you log in from a different machine; you have to add them all over again.
• One concern mentioned in several places on the net (e.g. here) relates to Skype's association with the notorious Kazaa spyware. However, Skype themselves make a fairly unambiguous declaration:

  

Online status

Although Skype is said to be firewall-proof, it was evident that my and/or my contacts online status was not always showing correctly. Quitting Skype and loggin in again would fix this, but required a telephone call or IM via AIM to instigate—not ideal. However, in Skype Preferences > Advanced you can set the default connection port e.g. 54045. I then configured my NAT router to enable port forwarding on this port which seems to have resolved the issue:

Update 15.06.05: No, this hasn't resolved the issue. In fact, so unreliable is the online/ offline status indicator that I have to keep logged into MSN + AIM so contacts can determine if I am online or not. Skype is more often wrong than right. Disappointing.

Conclusion

There is currently no free, cross-platform, firewall-proof solution that provides easy-to-use, ad-free, and comprehensive messenging services (text, file transfer, audio and video chat). Apple's iChat (Mac) and Trillan Pro (PC) make a lovely and full-featured pair—but the firewall issues are a real drawback. For now, but with reservations, Skype gets my vote.

Final tip

Mac users might like to check out SoundSource, a free menu bar app that lets you easily swap between audio input/ output via a headset, or via your Mac's built-in speakers and mic.

Update 24.08.05: Google have released Google Talk, a client for Windows only which allows IM to several Mac clients, but "talk" is not supported except Windows-to-Windows using Google Talk on both PCs. Furthermore, a Gmail account is a prerequisite. Here is how to configure iChat to use your Google Talk account.

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