I’m still struggling to get caught up with writing about life at the moment, it seems that by the time I’ve done something fun and noteworthy then I’m hurtling off to do the next one. Oh, if only my old GCSE English teacher could see me now, voluntarily writing 800 word essays 🙂 That’s an interesting aside, I try not to name names online, but it is true when it’s said that you never forget a good teacher.

This weekend, I needed to help somebody do a task on their computer, but I couldn’t use too much jargon to talk them through it over the phone, well teamspeak and a headset but same difference and what I needed was an easy method of sharing their computer screen to show them what was meant.

I’ve used Adobe Connect for a while at work as a way of interacting with other people over the internet, it’s a very good tool and because it uses Flash and sits in your browser, you don’t need to mess about with routers and NAT traversal like you do with something like Windows XP’s Remote Assistance, but it costs noticably more than nothing, so it was no use for home. A bit of Googling about later revealed that the tool I wanted turned out to be, Adobe Connect Now. Yup, it’s now free. Yay.

I signed up for the free service, the email to confirm my address came through immediately (unlike a couple of others I tried that took half an hour to email me) and it just worked. You only get one meeting ‘space’ per account with the free version, but that’s ok because I’m only one person. I then send the URL to my meeting room to the person you’re assisting, they click on it to enter, I confirm in the webpage that they’re allowed in, I promote them to ‘host’ and they click the ‘share desktop’ button. Instant win and showing somebody what I meant was so much less fustrating than trying to talk them through it.

Definately one to add to your toolkits.