(music)
- [Don] Hi, this is Don McAllister,
and welcome to another weekly tip video.
This week, I'm going to take a look
at how we can remotely assist friends and family
by using the built-in screen sharing in Mac OS,
specifically in Messages.
There are many times when it will be so useful
to either view or take control of a remote Mac
when trying to help out, and with Messages,
you can do this without any third-party software.
So, to demonstrate I'm going to use my iMac Pro
and my MacBook Pro.
You're currently looking at my MacBook Pro,
and across on the iMac, I've sent a message across
saying, having trouble with system preferences,
can you help?
And I've sent that via the standard Messages application.
So I'm logged in as Don McAllister over there
and I'm logged in as SEO demo over here.
Now, I can respond to this,
of course you could just pick up the phone
but it's so much easier to get remote control
or to view the remote screen when you're dealing
with any support issues.
The way you would do that is to, well,
with this particular message selected,
if you go to Buddies, you can ask to share screen,
or if we click away, select the message here,
control or right-click and again we can say
ask to share screen.
Now, I have got a ScreenFlow session running across
on the iMac Pro, so we should see
what happens over there.
Let me go ahead and ask to share screen,
and we got a popup message, which we can just accept.
And as you can see SEO demo 2016 is
requesting permission to share your screen.
You can either allow them to control or observe.
I'm gonna go ahead and say Control My Screen.
So across on the Mac Book Pro, there we go.
Now I've got a dual monitor setup across on the iMac Pro.
I have a 4k monitor and the iMac pro screen itself,
which I've set to a low resolution,
so we can see it a bit clearer during the demo.
So rather than both displays,
I'm going to go with this one.
This is the the main display on the iMac Pro,
but again set to a low resolution.
There's my IMAX screen,
currently scaled so I can see the entire display
if I want to go to a zoomed in version
and I can just pan around the screen.
I can do that, but we'll put it back to scaling.
I want to run System Preferences,
I can go to here, say System Preferences,
and then I can go in and help them out.
You can switch on your microphone as well,
or you can mute your microphone.
You do that by going to Connection,
and here, Mute Microphone.
That way they can't hear the screams of anguish
from this side.
My microphone is muted.
They can also mute their microphone
on the other side as well.
And if we just close this down,
some of the things to have a look at,
if you want to switch to just Observing mode
rather than Controlling mode, we can switch that on.
The cursor changes to this magnifying glass
so they've now got control.
So, you could at this point unmute the microphone
and talk them through any operation.
But I'll go back to normal control.
There's also a shared clipboard,
so if you want to copy something
from the clipboard, you can use a shared clipboard.
You can also transfer files as well,
so if I go across to the Finder, say.
That's using Command Tab on the remote machine,
which I actually don't want to do.
So let me just go back to here
and across on my machine.
Now if I go to the Finder, that's better.
We'll select a Finder window.
If I just get this document here, Joe,
I should be able to just drag that file
and drop it on to the desktop.
There we go, we can see the file transfer,
and if I close that window down,
close this window down, yep, there's our Joe document
across on the desktop of the iMac pro.
So very straightforward, very easy to use.
If you want to disconnect, the other person
on the other side can disconnect you.
Let me just show you that.
If we go across to the iMac pro,
now because I've got so many things in my menu bar,
the Remote Control icon is pushed Off,
but if I just click on here,
you can see I can allow SEO to control my screen,
Mute Microphone, Pause Screen Sharing
or End Screen Sharing.
But if I just go back to my MacBook Pro over here
I can just go, what if I go to Connection
and say Close, that will close the remote connection down.
And across on the iMac Pro you'll see the message
saying that I've closed the connection.
Now one final thing to show you,
and that's the fact that you can block people
from requesting access to your desktop,
and the way you would do that,
I'm across on the iMac pro,
if I request or ask to share the screen
of SEO demo 2016, across on my MacBook Pro,
I could accept or I can decline,
but when I click on Decline,
you'll see I have the option to block the user.
Let me go ahead and just accept this,
'cause I want show you just one final thing
before we we go so I'll let them observe my screen.
We'll say Accept.
So back on the iMac Pro, I can now observe the screen.
I've got this little magnifying glass.
If I click and hold, I get this magnified loop,
so I can look at a bit more detail
at the remote screen.
Now as far as I know, there's no way
of increasing the magnification
or making that circle bigger,
so it's just a gesture really,
but let go and you just have the magnifying glass.
Click and hold, and you get this magnification loop.
Go ahead and we'll disconnect.