Cross-platform, Easy-to-Use Local LAN Chat? 39
Ars-Gonzo asks: "I was at a conference last week, and had a surprising number of people connected to a peer-to-peer wireless LAN during the lectures. I saw several Mac users typing away during the lectures, and I found out later that they were using iChat's Rendezvous-based local chat to talk to each other. iChat's local subnet chatting functionality is supposedly based on Jabber, but I can't get a Jabber client (on Windows or Linux) to connect to iChat, locally. Has anyone seen any iChat compatible LAN-chat apps for a platform other than Mac?"
Probably not Jabber-based (Score:5, Informative)
And good luck on getting 3rd-party support for other protocols in iChat. Apple's got that bolted down to AIM and Local LAN chatting.
irc, of course (Score:2, Informative)
alpha code is out there (Score:1, Informative)
Jchat [dotlocal.org]
Re:irc, of course (Score:3, Informative)
Searched - Eimp (Score:2, Informative)
I was able to find this http://eimp.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net], but rendezvous support isn't fully integrated. The feature status is at 50% now and the developer hasn't posted anything in 4 months. There are rendezvous libraries in the latest release.
I'm in the process of trying out Eimp. Its not a very robust program, but it does seem to offer rendezvous support. I'm testing it now, I'll reply with results.
There is also JXTA - a jabber/rendezvous/zeroconf chat protocal being developed by sun.
Re:Searched - Eimp (Score:3, Informative)
iChat does borrow from Jabber... (Score:2, Informative)
So while it does borrow from Jabber, it doesn't "use" Jabber. You can't connect to a Jabber server, nor communicate directly between Jabber & iChat.
There are some chat clients out there with similar functionality on Windows (and I believe Linux), but they're somewhat hit-and-miss affairs, from my experience. I like the suggestion to just get an iBook - I already have one
Vypress chat (Score:3, Informative)
All windowsen
http://vypress.com/products/chat/unix/
All unixen
It broadcasts the messages on the local subnet, udp port 8167.
Protocol compatible with another 2 or 3 simmilar chat programs.
Used a lot in Romania in the residential networks.
Re:iTunes chat (Score:3, Informative)