I’ve been thinking about this since the time the product was announced.
Pictured here, Apple’s new iChat software is to allow screen sharing over an Internet or network connection.
This is SO cool. It has the real possibility to save me quite a bit of hassle in the future, from little things like moving my MacBook out of the way to do things on my iMac, to big things like showing a relative how to do something or fixing their Mac to do what they want (describing things over the phone is hard work!)
But to make this software truly convenient to me, and to open up a world of computing abilities, I really need to be able to set iChat to accept (certain) incoming screen-sharing requests automatically.
I can see Apple may wish to shy away from implementing this functionality due to security concerns and stupid users, but I truly hope they do ship iChat with it.
It means that I’ll be able to set my iMac to always accept connections from my MacBook, so I can do things on it from anywhere. Be it my bed, my kitchen, my (soon to be) living room, my home in Blagdon or anywhere in the University with that killer-fast Wi-Fi connection, I instantly will have everything my home Mac offers available to me.
I’m thinking along the lines of bring able to retrieve photos, music and movies stored in iTunes and external hard drives mainly, and generally any other files I might want.
Probably the most likely use of this for me is to keep an eye on how BitTorrent is doing.
It might not be that this is a feature that will get used often, but when it is used it’ll be brilliantly liberating.
And that, my friends, is my main hope for iChat in Leopard.
In the meantime, I use VNC–installing Vine Server as the server on the computer I want to connect to and Chicken of the VNC as the client on my Mac. It’s a tad slow, but it works for now.
I have been thinking about this idea also… Its great if you have multiple Mac’s in house and you suddenly think of a fix or want to check on some status on the the other mac. There must be a way to create auto permissions to login.
I use Vine Server and Chicken of the VNC and it is way faster than the built in VNC server in Tiger. I haven’t used it in Leopard yet since the program needs updating for it, but I assume the same will be the case as Leopards built in VNC server is faster than Tiger but slower than Vine Server on Tiger.