Mac OS X Lion: The Missing Manual

iChat Theater

Talk about the next best thing to being there. The iChat Theater feature lets you make pitches and presentations to people and committees in faraway cities—without standing in a single airport-security line.

That’s because iChat Theater turns the chat window into a presentation screen for displaying and narrating your own iPhoto or Keynote slideshows, QuickTime movie files, and even text documents. Your buddy, on the other end of the iChat line, sees these documents at nearly full size—with you in a little picture-in-picture screen in the corner.

All you need is:

• Some stuff to show off. iChat Theater can display exactly the same kinds of files that Quick Look (Chapter 1) can display: Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents; photos; text and HTML files; PDF files; audio and movie files; fonts; vCards; Pages; Numbers; Keynote and TextEdit documents, and so on.

• A zippy broadband Internet connection. iChat Theater likes 384 kilobits per second or faster; check with your Internet provider if you aren’t sure of your connection speed.

Figure 20-10. Top: You can start an iChat Theater session by choosing File→Share a File with iChat Theater, or as shown here, by simply dropping the file on an open video chat window and going for the iChat Theater option. Bottom: Once you’ve started a Theater show in iChat, the shared file takes center stage so you both can look at it and discuss amongst ...