Apple goes into detail aboput Leopard's expanded Instant Message framework...

Apr 24, 2007 12:55 GMT  ·  By

Everybody that was interested already knows about the Leopard features that Apple is talking about, either from the WWDC keynote or from the presentation sites. While Apple has not yet gone into the Top Secret features, it has begun to go into more detail about the features it has shown.

Designed specifically for developers, Apple's "Leopard Technology Series" goes into the details, explaining how everything works behind the scenes and how developers can make use of these capabilities built into the latest OS X.

The iChat 4.0 features details how programmers can access information about instant messaging contacts and start iChat theater sessions to share additional video and audio content during conferences. "One of the powerful capabilities that the Instant Message framework gives you is the ability to determine if a contact in a user's buddy list is online or not. You can also get the Address Book data for that contact as well as other status information," the company wrote. "This information is collectively referred to as 'presence.' And once you tap into this presence data, your application can be notified when information about a contact changes." The iChat Theater, feature is very flexible, allowing applications to present anything from a slide show to a video feed and 3D graphics, complete with sound, to any number of conference participants. "IMAVManager works with the other classes in the Instant Message framework to enable you to build sophisticated conferencing capabilities into your application," Apple said. "For example, you can use IMService to determine who is available to participate in a chat, and then use IMAVManager to setup and run the iChat Theater presentation."

In addition to these frameworks, Apple has also improved AppleScript to allow near total control of iChat's features. "With Leopard, iChat's scripting dictionary has been expanded to include nearly all of the iChat operations you can perform interactively with a keyboard and mouse," Apple wrote. "You can access this scripting functionality either from an application or directly from an AppleScript."