As most of you know, iMessage is Apple’s version of cross-platform mobile instant messaging and it will be available to the public once iOS 5 is released this Fall. So far iMessage works between iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad users and sadly Apple didn’t mention anything about including Mac users at WWDC 2011.
However, a developer recently dug through OS X Lion’s iChat framework and discovered two extra lines of code that weren’t there in the previous version of OS X (the new additions are are highlighted in bold):
@interface IMMessage : NSObject
{
IMHandle *_sender;
IMHandle *_subject;
NSAttributedString *_text;
NSString *_plainBody;
NSDate *_time;
NSDate *_timeDelivered;
NSDate *_timeRead;
The two new additions to iChat’s framework, “timeDelivered” and “timeRead”, are actually lines of code that belong to iMessage and are new to iChat. With that said, it makes sense that Apple would want to slowly integrate their new iMessage service into the world of computers – starting with iChat.
I actually covered an iMessage for OS X Lion concept video back in June an if Apple does decide to bring the service over to OS X, it could look something like this:
With that said, stay tuned for more news and rumors related to Apple and their iMessage service.
