Mac OS X Leopard: The Missing Manual

Sharing Your Screen

As you've seen already in this chapter, iChat lets you share your thoughts, your voice, and your image with the people on your buddy lists. And now, for its next trick, it lets you share…your computer.

iChat's screen sharing feature is a close relative of the network screen-sharing feature described in Chapter 13. It lets you not only see what's on a far-away buddy's screen, but control it, taking command of the distant mouse and keyboard. (Of course, screen sharing can work the other way, too.)

You can open folders, create and edit documents, and copy files on the shared Mac screen. Sharing a screen makes collaborating as easy as working side by side around the same Mac, except now you can be sitting in San Francisco while your buddy is banging it out in Boston.

And if you're the family tech-support specialist—but the family lives all over the country—screen sharing makes troubleshooting a heckuva lot easier. You can now jump on your Mom's shared Mac and figure out why the formatting went wacky in her Word document, without her having to attempt explaining it to you over the phone. ("And then the little thingie disappeared and the doohickey got scrambled…")

Note

Of course, in these days of Big Scary Internet Security Issues, you want to make sure the person you share your screen with is someone you trust completely, because he or she is going to have the same access to your Mac as you do. Needless to say, do not accept screen-sharing invitations from people you don't ...