La COVID-19 pandemic The reality behind video calls has changed and with them the attachment we have for them. In fact, dozens of messaging services already integrate video calls as one more function within their applications. In the case of the Apple ecosystem we have FaceTime which first appeared in June 2010 on iOS. This presentation was made Steve Jobs, the founder and former CEO of Apple. In an interview with former Apple engineer Justin Santamaría recounts how Jobs reacted to FaceTime the first time he saw the tool working at full capacity.
'I'm going to make people shit their pants': Steve Jobs on FaceTime
I was in my boss's office with a team... and someone was in another office. We were using four computers set up to go, and I remember being briefed on what happened, pretend it's going fine. It's a beta software, weeks before launch... when FaceTime made that woom sound, that's when it came out of the woom into 3D view, and I remember Steve being like, 'Oh my God, I'm going to make people shit their pants.'
This is Steve Jobs's reaction to the first version of FaceTime that Justin Santamaría recounts in the Techmeme Ride Home podcast. Santamaría led the iPhone engineering team and created iMessage, FaceTime, and the concept of green and blue messages in Messages. His tenure at Apple ended in February 2013 and he embarked on building his own company called Future.
At the interview discusses Jobs's reaction to the early FaceTime betas. Apparently hearing the familiar FaceTime buzz, Jobs saw a really good opportunity to innovate and bring people together through his products. The evolution of the service has been notorious in recent years with the group video calls, the possibility of making calls with Android users or the possibility of sharing the screen through SharePlay.
Well, with how well iChat was doing on the Mac, they could have improved it and avoided that grotesque thing of having face time and iMessage. One for video and one for messages being able to have both on iChat!!!! Yes, Jobs, we shit our pants but out of anger at such stupidity!!!!