Anyone who's been skulking around here for a longish while already knows this, but apparently it bears repeating: sometimes we're kinda slow to "get it." For example, when the iPod first came out, we weren't terribly excited-- but now if you were to attempt something so foolhardy as to pry our iPods from our white-knuckled grasp, you'd better come at us with nothing less lethal than a howitzer strapped to all 96 episodes of "Small Wonder," because otherwise you'd be dead before you hit the floor. In other words, we have a history of lukewarm first impressions eventually morphing into varying degrees of rabid fandom. Which means that someday we might end up being raving iChat AV addicts, despite the fact that less than twenty-four hours ago we considered videoconferencing to be one of those prime examples of essentially pointless technology that exists purely for technology's own sake.

So here's what happened last night: we had a Sony DCR-TRV11 MiniDV camcorder sitting around, and the iChat AV beta was right there for the downloading, so we figured we should at least give it a try. And we'll say this: it looks to us like Apple got it right. Before long and with minimal fuss, we had an honest-to-goodness video chat running with faithful viewer and friend Shane Burgess, whom we hadn't seen since the Great AtAT Wedding of 2001. (Longtime viewers will recall a time when we actually had planned hiatuses.) The quality of the video was, frankly, outstanding, and while the experience wasn't quite like being in the same room as him, it was probably the closest we were going to get without driving forty minutes across state lines.

Circumstances and the laws of time, space, and dimension being what they are (curse you, laws of time, space, and dimension!), without iChat AV, we probably could've gone another decade without seeing Shane "in person." And then there's faithful viewer Iron Giant, whose friend lives in some town called Haynes, Alaska. Apparently Haynes is all set up with AirPort-compatible wireless access, so the Giant's friend just hooked up a webcam to his PowerBook, fired up iChat DV, and gave the Giant a virtual tour of the city. Quoth Mr. Giant-- from his humble abode a gazillion miles away in Arkansas-- "I was waving at people in the street and everything! It rocked!" Hmmmm... maybe there's something to this, after all.

That said, we still think that David Foster Wallace was pretty much right when he described the fundamental problems of videophone technology for everyday conversations (e.g. you actually have to look interested), so we tried the audio-only chat option, too-- with legendary AtAT semi-intern and mascot Nico (longtime viewers will recall Nico from when we actually had time to update Viewer Mail)-- and were glad to find that it works just fine, as well. And being able to mix video and audio chats with traditional text-based instant messaging is a spiffy way to get past the modern problem of having to read someone a URL or email address over the phone. All of which leads us to believe that iChat AV isn't just a chat program with a few gimmicky extras thrown in; it's striving to be a complete real-time communications package with features that scale appropriately to whatever its users need at the time.

Or it's just a handy way for distant strangers to get naked with each other. You decide.