Jitsi (SIP Communicator)


This is a tad geeky, at least the current version, but if that doesn’t frighten you, here’s a video, audio and chat communicator for you. It can handle numerous protocols such as SIP, XMPP/Jabber, AIM/ICQ, Yahoo!, Facebook and GoogleTalk and therefore allows you to handle all your chat applications in one place at the same time.

It’s another Open Source project, not a commercial operation so they have no interest in mining your personal data and are quite proud of their strong encryption and security protocols.

You get what you’d expect from a communicator, such as:

  • chat
  • calls (video and audio)
  • screen sharing
  • file transfers
  • conference calls (audio and video)

It’s a bit like MSN Messenger or Skype. And of course you can have it in Gaelic – a brilliant way of forcing some Gaelic on Facebook Chat or GoogleTalk! And there’s even a Gaelic spellchecker bundled with it:

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If you just want to sign in using an existing account, that’s easy enough and all you have to do is to download the installation file and follow the instructions.

You can do an awful lot with Jitsi, say if you’re a company and want to hold secure video conferences using your own servers but you’d be best advised to get an IT tech to set it up for you.

For beginners, there’s some guidance on the Jitsi website.

On MacOS
Not hard, just get the package and mount it:

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It may prompt you to install Java Runtime, you have to agree to that:

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But that’s it. Happy chatting!

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