Four reasons to get your parents to use Leopard

I held the phone tightly in my right hand. With my left, I rubbed my dry, tired eyes. I looked at the clock in my Mac's menu bar. I had been on the phone for forty-five minutes, with no indication that I'd be hanging it up any time soon.

"OK," I said in a slow, deliberate tone. "Let's start from the beginning. Click on the Mail menu. A list should appear. Do you see it?"

A pause. "Yes," my mother said.

"What do you see in that list?" I said.

"File ... About Mail ... Preferences ...."

"Good. Do you see 'Quit'?"

"Yes."

"Excellent. Click on 'Quit' and we'll start again."

Welcome to my personal hell, circa 2006. Pull up a chair. Get comfortable. We're going to be here for quite a while.
That was the night I snapped; the night I lost my mind explaining Mail to a person for whom the concept is more arcane than a Dennis Miller reference. The night that would have been so much better if only we had Leopard.

If you're the person in your family who is often called upon to provide free tech support (or, as I call it, the "sucker"), this post is for you. If your parents/aunties/sister/parole officer are running Mac OS 10.4 or earlier, you must convince them to upgrade to Leopard. Here's how.

iChat screen sharing. There's a story in Christian tradition about St. Paul, who was a grumpy old sourpuss until the day he decided to take a road trip to Damascus. That's when the Lord himself showed up and, to make a long story short, turned that frown upside down.

This is precisely what iChat 4.0 has done for me. Soon after Leopard was released, I upgraded my parents' iMac and created an AIM account for them. Now, remote trouble shooting is so simple it's almost ... divine.

To initiate a screen sharing session, simply create a chat with your intended target. Next, select "Ask to share remote screen" from the Buddies menu. At this point, you can see and control that remote Mac. There's no additional configuration required, no determination of your partner's IP address. It just works.

Open the sky and queue the choir.

Video Chat with the kids. I live in Massachusetts and my parents are in Florida. It's tough for them to share in their grandkids' lives across that span (or, as I call it, my Eleven-hundred Mile Sanity Buffer Zone). Video chat helps to bridge the miles.

It couldn't be easier to create a video chat. When your target comes online, simply click the green "camera" icon next to their name in iChat. They'll hear an old-style telephone "ring" on their end, and see a button prompting them to accept the call. That's it! We have a laptop at home, so it's great fun to "carry" my parents around during a birthday party, holidays and so on. Plus, the kids get a real kick out of it.

Here's where it gets good. iChat for Leopard includes iChat Theater. This allows you to select an album of photos in iPhoto and display them as a slideshow to your chat participants. It's a great feature for this situation.

Time Machine. I don't know about your folks, but my parents' backup plan is about as reliable as Britney Spears' career. With Time Machine, you know their machine is being backed up at regular intervals, and they don't have to lift a finger.

Simply purchase a USB or Firewire drive and connect it for them. A simple dialog box will ask if you'd like to use that device for Time Machine backups. Say "yes" and you're done.

Mail Stationery. I know, I know. HTML email is evil. It's a bandwidth-hogging assault on your inbox. Here's something you don't know: Grandmas love it.

First of all, they'll think you're immensely clever for creating such a "beautiful" email message. Secondly, they'll save that message to show to all their buddies (I'm speaking from experience here).

So there you have it. Armed with this information, $129US (or $199 for the family pack) and a couple hours of free time, you can make the Mac experience more enjoyable ... for everyone.

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Source: http://www.apple.com/macosx/

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I held the phone tightly in my right hand. With my left, I rubbed my dry, tired eyes. I looked at the clock in my Mac's menu bar. I had...

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Stephen R

If the iChat route doesn't work for you, I **highly** recommend getting them to download a free VNC app called "Vine Server".

The interface is very easy. One of the first things I noticed is that when you open it, it gives your IP address (internal and external) right away. Then you fire up Chicken of the VNC and have them read their exdternal IP to you. That's it. You're in.

If they're behind a firewall and that's giving you trouble, you have them open a "reverse connection" and you give them _your_ IP.

More complicated than iChat, to be sure, but still quite easy. Vine Server blows away any other VNC program I've tried -- if for no other reason than the fact taht it puts IP addresses right in your face automatically. :)

(Yes, there's a Vine Client, too, but that's a for-pay program.)

April 10 2008 at 1:37 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Kev Orng

Wish it would help with my dad; his problem is Spam.

Every time I see him, we inevitably have a discussion whereby I have to explain, at length, why the government can't just step in and put a stop to spam with some kind of magical anti-spam legislation, and where I further have to explain that maybe the reason there's so much spam is because half of his friends are running Windows ME without a router or firewall and are part of Botnets and don't even know it. Then I have to explain Botnets. Then I bring it home and tell him that he could help cut down on Spam by encouraging his friends to upgrade their systems to at least WinXP with a router and firewall, if not just a Mac and make my life easier, and then maybe we can put this @$#% conversation to rest before it goes into year three.

But to no avail, no matter what I say, I'll be sitting on the dock at the cottage this summer, talking about why legislation hasn't stopped spam.

April 08 2008 at 12:03 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

YoJIMbo

I found Leopard useful for my entire family of Parole Officers (and their Aunties). Thanks!

April 08 2008 at 9:47 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Håvard Pedersen

Oh, you mean like Windows' Remote Help which has been there since the launch of XP years ago? :)

April 08 2008 at 9:18 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

1 reply to Håvard Pedersen's comment

Techtistic

Give me a break. Remote Assistance is such a royal pain in the ass to setup for someone over the phone. You have to explain port-forwarding to the end-user 90% of the time and walk them through setting it up. Even after it's all setup, making an invitation takes way too long and the procedure is far more complicated and forgettable than the iChat Screen Sharing way. I'm a Microsoft Certified System Administrator, but I loath using Windows. OS X is hands-down easier to use, and in my opinion, better in SO many ways.

April 09 2008 at 10:23 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

dan

brilliant! :)

April 08 2008 at 4:49 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

iChat is flaky for me to say the least, and for many others it seems. Do a search for iChat Error 8 on the Apple Discussions board and you'll see what I mean. I've wasted hours trying to solve the issue.

LogMeIn however works like a dream, and hasn't let me down once.

April 08 2008 at 2:36 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Crabs

Unfortunately, I am the sucker, but my dad runs XP, on both his laptop and the family desktop. The worst thing is, my dad knows tech stuff, he just...doesn't know how to troubleshoot Windows. I think it's because when I was still in the house, he'd always just have me do it because in my dark Window's days (may they never return), I spent an inordinate amount of time figuring out how to make everything work (rather than it just working as it does with OS X).

And then my mom, who is more or less computer illiterate, runs Tiger, and can't upgrade to Leopard because her MacBook is owned by the school district (she's a teacher), and she can't do that until the whole school district upgrades (which probably won't happen until they buy all the teachers new computers).

So I'm stuck troubleshooting both the old fashioned way. Luckily (for them), I live less than an hour away, and unless they desperately need the problem fixed immediately, they'll just wait until I'm up there again.

I really wish I could get my dad to move to Mac (he and one of my sisters are the last Windows holdouts in the family), and get my mom upgraded to Leopard. It would just make life easier.

April 08 2008 at 12:09 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

shirster

I'd LOVE to buy a Mac for my parents, sadly there is no Chinese handwriting input system available for the Mac.

April 07 2008 at 11:07 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Catt

Nice post wish I could get some of my PC owning friends to switch.

April 07 2008 at 10:01 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Ha! You people have it lucky! My 70+ year old parents refuse to use a computer. They insist on sticking with their MSN WebTV, and then ask me why certain things from the Internet don't work.

And getting Comcast to understand over the phone that the 'computer' my parents are using is a Web-only device is a real treat.

I wish my parents would accept the Mac I wanted to give them, but they're drawing the line on computers because they've seen how difficult my sister's PC has been.

April 07 2008 at 8:14 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply