Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Lion Edition

iChat Theater

iChat Theater turns the chat window into a presentation screen for displaying and narrating your own iPhoto or Keynote slideshows, QuickTime movie files, and even text documents. Your buddy, on the other end of the iChat line, sees these documents at nearly full size—with you in a little picture-in-picture screen in the corner.

All you need is:

• Some stuff to show off. iChat Theater can display exactly the same kinds of files that Quick Look (Chapter 2) can display: Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents; photos; text and HTML files; PDF files; audio and movie files; fonts; vCards; Pages; Numbers; Keynote and TextEdit documents, and so on.

• A zippy broadband Internet connection. iChat Theater likes 384 kilobits per second or faster; check with your Internet provider if you aren’t sure of your connection speed.

To get the show running, you can take one of two approaches.

• If a video chat is under way, you can just drag the file(s) you want to share into the video window. iChat asks if you want to send the file to the person or share it with iChat Theater (Figure 12-24, top). Click iChat Theater, of course.

• If no video chat is in progress, choose File→Share a File in iChat Theater. Locate the file you want to present on your hard drive. When iChat asks you to start a video chat with the buddy who’s going to be your audience, click the video-camera icon next to that person’s name (or choose Video→Invite to Video Chat).

When your friend accepts, the curtain goes up, as shown the ...