I’ve been trying to webcam with my father-in-law for a solid week now and we finally found a working solution – SightSpeed. He’s on Windows XP and I’m on OSX Tiger. The image is about as clear as when I iChat with my mother, but we had difficulty with image freeze about every 5 seconds on full screen mode. I hardly ever see image freeze on my iChats. Still, the solution works and the inlaws got to talk to and see their grandkids. I particularly like that when you put the program in full screen mode, it sets the image of who you are talking to onto the desktop instead of taking over the screen completely. This lets you manipulate your OS while you are chatting.

In other news, I installed Google’s Sketchup and Google Earth on the MacBook this week. I have not had time to play with Sketchup but have heard good things about it from friends in the past. I also have Blender, the Open Source 3D modeling software. Someday I will find the time to learn both of those programs. Maybe not.

I found a free editor for coding web applications on the Mac – Smultron

Smultron is made entirely in Cocoa and looks pretty sweet. I can use it for Ruby coding with text highlighting for that and many more languages. After I use it some more I’ll review it in more depth.