Sharing the Mac screen through iMessage
Sharing your Mac screen with someone else who also owns a Mac is incredibly easy. There are several ways to share your screen, and it’s quite useful in case our friend or family member needs help on his or her computer to do a job or just to try to solve some kind of problem.
Sometimes we have to resort to third party applications such as Team Viewer but if both you and your friend have a Mac, you can share the screen via Messages as and we’re going to do next.
The first thing to note is that this only works if you’re working on a Mac , leaving aside all iOS devices such as an iPhone or iPad. Obviously this operation must be done carefully with someone you have full confidence in because they will see your screen as you see it, with your personal data and confidential files. In addition, there is the possibility that you can give him/her a remote control so that this person can move around your desktop as he/she wishes, so we must be even more careful that he/she doesn’t delete anything at all.
Once we’ve taken this precaution, we can open the message application and send an iMessage to the person we want to share the screen with. In the upper right corner of Messages within the conversation with your friend or family member you will see the word “Details” . When you click here you’ll see an icon with two overlapping screens where you click and see two possible actions:
- Invite to share my screen. Here we will obviously be offering visual access to our screen without any remote control.
- Request screen sharing. With this we send a request to see our friend’s screen.
When you select one of the two options an invitation will be sent and when you accept it, screen sharing will start and an audio call will be enabled so you can talk to your colleague while you are working.
If we want to stop screen sharing simply we’ll click on the two overlapping windows at the top and hit “Stop screen sharing”. And if we want to stop displaying our friend’s screen we’ll simply close the window on the red button in the top left corner.
Enabling the Display Remote Control
In addition to displaying, as I said at the beginning, you can also allow another person to control your screen by giving them full access to the computer. Again, you should be careful because this person will be able to screw you over if they want to delete files.
There are two ways to enable the remote control:
- When you receive the invitation, when you accept it you will see a dialog box where you can select “Control my screen”, to start the remote control.
- If you are already sharing the screen and want to start the remote control at some point, you can go to the icon with two overlapping screens at the top in the menu bar and select “Allow [name] to control my screen”. And right here we can also restrict this access.
It’s important that you’re both logged into iCloud with the ID you used in Messaging, and you should also make sure that your contact card includes your Apple ID in Mail.
If we are in the Apple ecosystem everything stays at home, and we see how something as interesting as sharing your screen can be done in various ways such as through Messages without third party application.
Leave us in the comment box what you think about this way of sharing the screen natively.
