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Meeting Report: 11th December 2009

During our Workship session SEAL members discussed (amongst many things) a problem with Mail crashing after setting up Exchange integration (which turned out to be a problem with the calendars synced to iCal) and setting up home pages in Safari.

We had two presentations at this meeting:

John Pugh gave a presentation on the Mac OS X services feature which has been greatly enhanced in Snow Leopard. John demonstrated the built in services and showed us how to build your own services in Automator. More information about services along with a selection of additional services for download are available from
Mac OS X Automation.

Nigel and Robert then showed how screensharing can be used both as a way to access computers (both Macs and other platforms) from afar and as an aid to giving and receiving assistance with computer problems. They demonstrated the screensharing feature of iChat and how screensharing for use on a local network is built into OS X. For further information, CNet have a useful article covering Mac to Mac screensharing tips.

For members with other platforms or those who have friends and family not yet converted to Macs Nigel and Robert showed how you can connect from a Mac to any computer running the free and open source VNC server. They also used LogMeIn.com to connect to a home PC. LogMeIn has a basic free version available (Windows and Mac compatible) along with a more comprehensive subscription product.

Other cross-platform screensharing options mentioned were Skype which provides an iChat-like experience but does not support remote control, Yuuguu which provides chat and full screensharing and Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection which is a good choice for local screensharing if you have a PC with a Professional, Business or Ultimate edition of Windows.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 14th, 2009 at 15:03 and is filed under Apple. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response.

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