iChat screen sharing now a Finder feature
Quite a few of you have noticed that the iChat screen-sharing feature introduced at last year's WWDC seems to have gone missing in the refresh of the Leopard feature pages on Apple's site. This would have been so helpful for the family tech support and whatnot, and probably easy to implement under the Apple Remote Desktop/VNC stack; why would Apple drop it? Turns out it's not dropped so much as relocated. The Finder feature page now indicates that "[by] clicking on a connected Mac, you can see and control that computer (if authorized, of course) as if you were sitting in front of it." Sounds like what iChat loseth, the Finder picketh up and runneth with...eth.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Eric M said 9:13AM on 6-12-2007
There is a problem with this though: Now you have to have that remote machine as a connected 'shared' computer, which could be difficult in comparison to just sharing through iChat. Now you have to get that remote persons IP, as well as deal with any router/firewall they may have in the way. All that stuff used to be take care of in the iChat transport protocols.
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Tris said 9:26AM on 6-12-2007
Yeth
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running said 9:28AM on 6-12-2007
well, it can still be part o iChat. I would wait for Betapard users.
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Dan Pourhadi said 9:44AM on 6-12-2007
As far as I can tell, iChat Screen Sharing is still a feature of iChat: the button is in the screen shot on the iChat demo pagem and according to a few of my friends who received the beta, it's still in the beta builds of iChat (though it doesn't exactly work).
So I don't think it's been removed from iChat. I think the Finder version is simply a dedicated local way of doing it independently of iChat.
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Berndt said 9:55AM on 6-12-2007
From the Apple web pages on iChat in Leopard:
"Show off (without showing up).
Why wait for a darkened room and a projector to present vacation photos or Keynote slides? Now you can do it all remotely, right in iChat. Put on an entire photo slideshow, click through a Keynote presentation, or play a movie — in full screen, accompanied by a video feed of you hosting — while your buddy looks on. In fact, you can show any file on your system that works with Quick Look."
I don't think anything other than this was ever intended for iChat.
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DrWho said 10:17AM on 6-12-2007
Well it kind of makes sense to be able to share screens through both iChat and Finder. Personally I'd rather do it through Finder because that means I can easily remote admin my mac mini that I use in my HT.
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G said 10:23AM on 6-12-2007
Berndt: "I don't think anything other than this was ever intended for iChat."
There was a screen sharing feature as a part of iChat, but it is now apparently part of the finder. There were 3 big things as a part of the iChat overhaul: Backdrops, iChat Theater, and screen sharing. Seemingly, the screen sharing went a different route.
iChat Theater and screen sharing are not the same thing.
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Craig M. said 10:41AM on 6-12-2007
This really sucks. This the one key feature I wanted so that I could switch my parents for M$ to Mac, it would have made the transition so much simpler, and I could easily configure their system for them without having to physically touch their system.......looks like they'll have to wait that much longer to switch, because I don't see them but once a year, and this year their visiting me. I can just imagine the headaches I would have trying to talk them through the setup and cofiguration of the switchover, if I didn't wait until then. Bummer.
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nick said 11:05AM on 6-12-2007
http://images.apple.com/macosx/leopard/features/images/ichat_gallery_jedi20070611.jpg
no worries, it's still in ichat.
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drebes said 3:23AM on 12-20-2007
Not really the same thing.
To have a "connected" Mac which is not in your local network (as it would obviously be the case if you want to give some remote assistance), you must be a .Mac subscriber. The iChat feature didn't seem to require that.
Bummer.
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