The beauty of Snow Leopard’s screen-sharing technology is that it isn’t Snow Leopard’s screen-sharing technology. It’s a popular, open standard called VNC (Virtual Network Computing). Once you’ve turned on Screen Sharing on your Snow Leopard Mac, any computer on earth with a free VNC client program— sort of a viewer program—can pop onto your machine [...]

If you’re sitting at your PC and you want to bring the Mac onto your screen, things generally don’t go quite as smoothly as they did with Windows XP or Vista. Windows 7 uses a different security method, which the Mac doesn’t know about. You can solve the problem, though, if you slog through an [...]

When you invite another Mac to a video chat, someone has to be sitting in front of it to accept your invitation. That’s an important privacy feature, of course, because it prevents total strangers from peeking in on you when you’re walking around in your underwear But having to have a live human at the [...]

If you’ve done nothing but chat in iChat, you haven’t even scratched the surface. The iChatÆPreferences dialog box gives you plenty of additional control. A few examples: ••General pane. If you turn on “Show status in menu bar,” you bring the iChat menulet to your menu bar. It lets you change your iChat status (Available, [...]

Nowadays, what’s attached to an email message is often more important than the message itself. You might send a PowerPoint file to a coworker or send your aunt a picture of your new dog, for example, without bothering to write anything more than “See attached” in the body of the message. That’s why it’s such [...]

If you open System PreferencesÆNetwork, click AirPort in the left-side list, and then click Advanced, you see thedialog box shown here. It lets you manage the list of WiFi hot spots that Mac OS X has memorized on your travels. For example, you can delete the old ones. You can also double-click a WiFi net’s [...]

If your Mac is connected wirelessly or, um, wirefully to a cable modem, DSL, or office network, you’re one of the lucky ones. You have a high-speed broadband connection to the Internet that’s always available, always on. You never have to wait to dial. Automatic Configuration Most broadband connections require no setup whatsoever. Take a [...]

(Choose aÆSystem Preferences; click Network.) This list summarizes the ways your Mac can connect to the Internet or an office network— Ethernet, AirPort wireless, Bluetooth, FireWire, cellular modem card, VPN (virtualprivate networking—a corporate thing), and so on. You set up all your network connections here, and you can connect and disconnect to all your networks [...]

Time Machine is a very different kind of backup program, and a real departure for longtime PC addicts. A few questions, therefore, are bound to come up—like these: 1.Can I back up more than one Mac onto the same disk? Yes. Each Mac’s backup is stored in a separate folder on that disk. 2.Can I [...]

All right, you’ve got Time Machine on the job. You sleep easy at night, confident that your life’s in order—and your stuff ’s backed up. Then, one day, it happens: Your hard drive crashes. Or you can’t find a file or folder you know you had. Or you save a document and then wish you [...]

The whole point of Time Machine, of course, is to have a backup of your entire hard drive. That’s how most peopleuse it. It’s conceivable, though, that you might want to exclude some files or folders from the Time Machine treatment. There are two reasons. First, you might not want certain, ahem, private materials  to [...]

Audio CDs and MP3 files aren’t the only sources of musical and spoken sound you can listen to as you work. iTunes also lets you tune in to hundreds of Internet-based radio stations, which may turn out to be the most convenientmusic source of all. They’re free, they play 24 hours a day, and their [...]