The MacMania™ Podcast

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Today We Discussed:

iChat Screen Sharing

As you may or may not know, besides podcasting and blogging, I also do a lot of various freelance technology-related work. This often includes graphic design, web design, various types of audio and video production, and private technological consulting and help. Anyway, many of the gigs I get for things such as that come from Craigslist, and I came across a post on Craigslist from a woman who was having trouble setting up iWeb to upload her newly-created site to her own servers. I began by calling her over the phone, and trying to walk her through the standard steps of iWeb, such as using CyberDuck, my FTP application of choice, to upload her site folder. None of that worked, as she was having issues connecting to her server. We were both pretty fed up, and, after over an hour on the phone, we decided to try iChat’s screen sharing. I had her open up iChat, enter her information, and instantly we were able to connect. I was surprised at how well this worked, as we were connecting between my house in Ohio and her place in Manhattan. While it did take awhile for the images on the screen to redraw, it was actually pretty usable. I was even more astonished later to hear that she was actually connecting using a Sprint mobile data connection! I have to give kudos to iChat’s image compression capabilities. I just thought that I would throw that out there, so that if you’re thinking about using screen sharing, you definitely should. It seems to have saved Tracie’s and my bacon this time. Tracie can be found at her website, Synthesis Dance Project.

Mail Dock Icon Tips

While poking around in Apple Mail’s preferences looking for something, I came across an interesting little feature in the “General” tab of the preference pane. You may have noticed by now that whenever you receive a message, Mail will display a badge on its dock icon indicating that you have an unread message. This can get really annoying, especially for easily-distracted people like myself. The gem of a preference that I found was one that allows you to turn off the dock badge, or at least change it around. For example, you can set it to not show the dock badge at all, or you can have it only from one mailbox or smart mailbox. I just thought I’d pass along that tip, and I hope that it helps you as much as it helped me!