Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com.
In this episode let me show you how to help out somebody by taking control of their Mac
starting with the Messages app.
Maybe you've been in this situation before.
You want to help somebody out.
Maybe a parent, maybe a child, somebody that is not at your location and they are having
trouble with their Mac or maybe they are just trying to figure out how to do something and
you know how to do it.
It's difficult sometimes to tell them over the phone or using email how to help them.
But you can take control of their screen using ScreenSharing.
Now a lot of time this involves configuring exactly where they are, what their IP address
is, setting things up on their Mac and all that.
But the simplest way to do it is to start by using the Messages app.
If you are using iMessage to communicate with them with the Messages app on your Mac and
their Mac you can very easily take over their screen and show them how to do something or
do it for them.
So I'm going to start off by just going into the Messages app.
If you don't have the messages app yet configured for you or the person that you're trying to
help then you want to just go into Messages and you go into Preferences, add your account
to it, and of course have them do the same thing.
You can use your email address, usually your Apple ID address right there, as the way to
contact them.
Now that I've got mine set up and they have theirs set up, and I have it here on my laptop
next to my desktop, I'm going to contact them using the Apple ID of the other machine.
Again this is on my desk where I have two machines on my desk.
But this can be somebody halfway around the world.
I'm going to type a message now at the bottom.
Just something that will get this going.
You can see here on the other screen I've got a message and I can respond.
Great.
So now that I've done that, of course you can use this for normal chatting, but if you
want to help the person out on a technical issue you can click on the Details button
here and then click on this ScreenSharing button and you can either invite them to share
your screen or you can ask them to share their screen.
So we'll ask to share their screen.
You can see on the other machine here we have a notification that we have to Accept.
Once we do we go into ScreenSharing.
So now we've got that and they're going to hear our voice over their speaker.
So you're doing something similar to FaceTime and you are actually communicating with voice.
Just audio only.
This is their screen and I'm seeing inside of a window here.
You can see when I go in I can hone in on it at specific spot and they will see there
which spot I'm looking at.
Now if I want to control what they've got you can see I have it set to binoculars for
observe mode.
I can switch to control mode and they'll get a question there of whether or not they want
to do it.
Now you can see I'm actually controlling their cursor.
So I can do things.
For instance I can run an app or just anything I want down here.
I'm basically controlling their cursor and their keyboard.
So I can run Safari.
So I'll run Safari on their machine and I can type.
So if I was going to doing something like say show them how to configure something on
their Mac I can do that by going to System Preferences and actually doing it.
So I can now use all the standard ScreenSharing things here.
I can even use the Shared Clipboard.
I can set the scaling so I can actually see their screen at full size and then move my
cursor around to adjust where I'm looking.
When I'm done with this I can actually just quit ScreenSharing or close the window here
and now we return here where we are just back in the regular Messages
chat and I've helped them out.
So this is great for helping out a relative, a parent, a child, anybody that needs help
with their Mac from your Mac.
It really works best when you're both using the latest operating system.
If they're using too old of an OS or you are then it's not going to work out.
So you want to make sure that everybody is up to date to begin with.
Then you can provide technical assistance to those you want just by using Messages.
Not having to setup anything special with your router or using any special software.
You can just do this by using the Messages app between two Macs.
Now this whole thing can be thwarted by some advanced security protections, firewalls,
certain routers may not allow traffic over this port that ScreenSharing needs.
But it should work for most people.
You may want to try it out before you actually need it.
So if there is somebody you sometimes help out with Mac stuff you may want to just chat
with them on Messages, try taking over their Mac so they can see what it's like and you
can see what it's like and then when you need it in the future it will be very easy for
you both to be able to set it up and do it.