iChat Streaming Icon - 1.3.1

Garbage - no instructions and doesn't work!

The author of this software responds to one post that people are lazy. His answer to another post is that Apple is lazy.

My experience with this software is that it absorbs so much of my PowerBook's available CPU that I cannot do anything whenever his software is running. I suppose is because my PowerBook is lazy.

To Alfeo below: I resubmitted my product several times to Apple to fix the wrong "Freeware" tag. But they were too lazy or dumb to see what has actually changed (the way you update your product there is to resubmit it completey - bad idea). Sorry for that but it was Freeware long ago and Apple has not understood that it's not anymore. I've submitted 1.2 to them with "Shareware". Let's see if they can manage that this time.

It's not my fault!

I really enjoy the idea behind this application. It appears to to a great job of animating the buddy icon. The author of this little app is right when he says that it is not his fault that the caching directory fills up, it is iChats fault. Yes, I can clear out my caching directory, but what about my friends? You see, not only are my icons cached, but also my buddy's icons are cached. This means that I'll be filling up their directories (if I were to use the video icon display) by just sitting in their buddy lists. This could make for a potential denial of service attack by running iChat. But then who would DDOS their buddy. No one, intentionally.

Apple needs to address this in their next release of iChat, not just because animated icons would be da' Bomb, but also because of the security risk. I noticed that with this application, the setting could be scaled down to update on seconds, which would make your buddys directorys fill up that much faster.

I say, great program and idea, but until Apple decides to address caching I would ditch the video portion of this app. I would be interested in a icon only Streaming Icon.

Bottom line, if you use this app, don't use the video part.

Andreas, your program is really cool, but the filling of that directory is problematic. As you stated, your app is not responsible for the filling of the cache, iChat is. As you know, iChat is made up of two processes: iChat and iChatAgent. After running your application over a weekend with two friends using it at the same time, my cache got REALLY big. I noticed this because iChatAgent started taking up more and more of my memory. For some reason, it began taking up 99% of my CPU cycles as well and it wouldn't work. i could log in, but not send or receive messages. i tried uninstalling iChat and all of my iChat hacks. Reinstalling it from scratch.... I was getting so fed up i was considering reinstalling OSX. Then i did a search and discovered the iChat cache directory. As soon as i cleared that out everything worked fine. there were many thousands of icons in that directory. It was quite difficult to delete.

Once again, your app is really cool, but i think Apple needs to work on their caching stragegy before i use it again. Plus those poor trillian users have to click "accept" every second =)