Disruptive Telephony

Silly me... I had forgotten Apple's über-minimalist design philosophy. Moments after hitting "Publish" on my hands-on review of FaceTime for the Mac, my friend Stuart Henshall pointed out that the "problem" I listed of not being able to shut off the video was NOT a problem. The answer is simple:

JUST QUIT THE FACETIME APPLICATION!

But, said I... how do I receive calls if the app isn't open?

Well, as Stuart pointed out to me, followed by multiple comments to the blog, in the background Apple is using their Push Notification framework to listen for incoming calls. And sure enough... after quitting the application I still was able to receive calls fine. When a call comes in the FaceTime application opens up and asks you if you want to accept the call. Simple. Easy.

And yes, "apsd-ft" is sitting there running as a background process:

In fact it seems that the only way to truly sign out of FaceTime is to go into the Preferences of the FaceTime app.

Leave it to Apple to change the way we are used to working (with other video apps) and go for what is a simpler method. Open FaceTime when you want to make a call. Close it when you are done. If a call comes in, it will "just work" and open up the app.

Flickr photo courtesy of striatic.

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