Using Facetime

Another method of communicating in video format with someone else is using FaceTime. Now FaceTime is an Apple product so you can only use it on Apple computers, Apple tablets and Apple smartphones, but you can select when you call somebody, do you want to call on the normal voice call or do you want to use video call with FaceTime?

Now, we are going to use this just with a computer at the minute, but you can also use it with your mobile phone or your tablet. It is simply an app. You just open up the app and you can dial straight away, or you can go to the Contacts, find the contact you are after contacting and hit the button to dial them on FaceTime, rather than the voice call.

So what we are going to do now, down on the left-hand side is the names of people, so we are going to just call Damian here. So we just hit the button there and it is going to be dialling him. So at the minute, it's just dialling the connection through.

Hi. So now we have got the call directly with Damian. In the top right-hand corner, you see my image and what you can do also with my image is a switch that is around. So if you are working on a mobile device, you have got a second camera on the back of it, you can push the button and you can show people where you are, rather than them looking at you.

If you just hover over the screen, it is different settings along here. You can turn your video off, you can turn the microphone off as well and also get the menu bar on the side opened up again if you wanted to, so you know whose you have called. So here we have got Damian's details there and again if we want to take that away, we just hit this button on the left and that vanishes. This button here just opens it up so that all of the screens is used up so that we just... Rather than have things in the background, we can concentrate more on what is happening and on a laptop, you have got a light at the top which is just telling you that the camera is on. You would not be able to see that because that is built into the computer itself.

To get rid of somebody or say goodbye to somebody rather, you can literally hit the X button here or they can, so bye Damian. So what we do then is just literally hit that button, it has cut them off fully and it has reverted back to the normal screen. So that is the simple way of having a FaceTime call.

There is lots of other fun things you can do with FaceTime, particularly if you are on a mobile device, there are ways you can change your face, you can have the face of a panda or an elephant and all sorts of other things if you wanted to. So different sort of effects you can run with it, but it is a very easy way of communicating directly with somebody with another Apple device.