Okay Geek Farm
Coding points to iMessage and iChat becoming one in the same
Ricardo Trejo
So here’s what happened; Someone found a couple lines of coding within OS X Lion’s iChat that point to some interesting developments that might integrate the desktop IM service with the upcoming iOS iMessage (SMS replacement) app. The idea isn’t as farfetched as it seems, since Apple is trying its best, and not always successfully, into simplifying and unifying its services.
MacRumors reports the following:
“@interface IMMessage : NSObject
{
IMHandle *_sender;
IMHandle *_subject;
NSAttributedString *_text;
NSString *_plainBody;
NSDate *_time;
NSDate *_timeDelivered;
NSDate *_timeRead;Buried in the framework of OS X Lion’s iChat, are two new properties – The “timeDelivered” and “timeRead’ fields that indicate the tracking of delivery and read receipts for instant messages. These features, however, are not supported in any of iChat’s native messaging protocols, while the same features are offered in Apple’s iMessage protocol. These properties were also not present in previous versions of iChat prior to OS X Lion.”
Okay, so I’m not going to sit here and pretend I know what that all means, but in layman’s terms I’m certain it means that iChat recently got some behind the scene reprogramming to set itself up to work like iMessage, perhaps even becoming the same application in different settings (desktop and mobile).
It’s not a completely new idea, as Jan Michael Cart had thought up something very similar back in June when he put together a video of this exact concept:
We’ll no doubtedly be hearing more about these findings when iOS 5 launches, and along with it iMessage. It’s already Sept. 14th and we still haven’t heard anything about the proposed iPhone 5 event that was due to happen some time this month, but it’s not unlike Apple to announce a press event just a few days before its due to happen.
