iMessage To Come To iChat?

One of the features in iOS 5 that we’re really looking forward to is iMessage, an Apple supported free messaging service between iPhone users. Frankly, anything that kills of SMS seems a good thing right about now. New href="http://www.macrumors.com/2011/09/14/apple-is-building-imessage-into-os-x-lions-ichat/">information uncovered by MacRumors shows that iMessages might be extending their reach, and could be combined with iChat on Mac OS X in the near future.

In the framework for iChat in Lion are the following properties:

@interface IMMessage : NSObject/> {/> IMHandle *_sender;/> IMHandle *_subject;/> NSAttributedString *_text;/> NSString *_plainBody;/> NSDate *_time;/> NSDate *_timeDelivered;/> NSDate *_timeRead;

Those two in bold are both new, and both unsupported by any of iChat’s protocols, but are present in iMessage.

Hopefully this means we’ll be able to easily and instantly message from iPhone to computer and back again using native Apple apps.