[GnomeMeeting-list] h.323 and Mac OS X

[Marc Williams <marcw onlymooo com>]

There's some news about h.323 and Mac OS X that I thought the list might
find interesting.  And it is tangentially related to Gnomemeeting.  :-)

While I've been globally communicating with friends and family for well
over a year using Gnomemeeting and Netmeeting, there's been one person
with whom I've been unable to communicate because he's a Mac user.  OS X
at that.  As you might know, there's been no h.323 solution for OS X
users.  Until now.

The project page for a new OS X h.323 project is:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/xmeeting/

The project lead for this is Shawn Hsiao and he has done a terrific job
so far.  He has assembled a working cocoa version of ophone called
OphoneX.  Ophone is an audio only command line application from the
openh323 people.  So how can a command line app also be cocoa?  Well, I
don't know how he did it, but you can see the screenshots from his
website.  The other thing he did was to include runtime versions of
pwlib and openh323 into OphoneX so that all a Mac user has to do is
click on his OphoneX desktop icon and away he goes.  No compiling of
pwlib, openh323, etc.  It's all included in the OphoneX app.

How's it work?  Well, so far, so good.  OphoneX is in alpha state right
now and there's quite a few features that I'm sure he'll be adding in
due time.  But for right now, I couldn't be more pleased.  And my Mac
head brother feels the same.  Btw, my brother is in Singapore and I'm in
the U.S.

We connect via my gatekeeper (gnugk) rather than direct IP and it seems
to work well.  We've tried both Gnomemeeting and Netmeeting on my end
and both work well although I like the audio quality from Gnomemeeting
better.

OphoneX is missing ILS and directory information.  And there's been a
couple of hang up and GK disconnect problems.  But nothing has been a
showstopper and our chats have lasted from 30-60 each.

So tell all your Mac head friends about this.  It should open quite a
few more doors.  Just don't write to me with any Mac type questions. 
I've never touched one.  Write to Shawn instead.