iChat has one more trick up its sleeve that's not precisely screen sharing, but worth mentioning: iChat Theater. With iChat Theater, you can share any file that Leopard can preview with Quick Lookâmovies, images, and Keynote presentations, for example, as well as slideshows of iPhoto albums, events, or libraries. This sharing can be alongside video, but a video camera isn't needed on either side to use this option.
Here's how to set it up:
In iChat, start with the File menu:
To share a file, choose File > Share a File with iChat Theater. In the resulting dialog, select any items you want to present; Command-click to select multiple items. Click Share.
To share from iPhoto, choose File > Share iPhoto with iChat Theater. In the resulting dialog, select the item that you want to present and click Share (The iPhoto Dialog Allows You to Select Albums or Entire Libraries to Share Via iChat Theater).
Figure 3-10. The iPhoto dialog allows you to select albums or entire libraries to share via iChat Theater.
iChat asks you to invite a buddy to a video chat (Figure 3-11).
Select a buddy and choose to invite them (choose Buddies > Invite to Video Chat, or click
next to the buddy's name, or Control-click (right-click)
and choose Invite to Video Chat).
The session starts, and now you can page through images and documents, or have them automatically paged through as in a slide show.
Tip
You can also start iChat Theater when you already have a video iChat session underway by dragging a file into the video window.
If the host and remote computer both have powerful enough processors and the connection sports enough bandwidth, a host's video stream of his- or herself can be tucked over to the side of the iChat window in side-by-side mode (Figure 3-12). For less powerful systems and less speedy connections, replacement mode is used, showing just the images and no video.
Figure 3-12. I'm inset via video on the lower left while showing a slideshow about Wi-Fi network connections in the main part of the iChat Theater display.
My colleague Joe Kissell and I have found that iChat Theater's presentation varies from what Apple promises for a given system configuration. Through trial and error, Joe made some discoveries about what works and what doesn't. He's documented this in a TidBITS article: "Using iChat Theater for Remote Presentations," at http://db.tidbits.com/article/9468.