Setting up Auto-Accept in iChat

Hey guys, this is mackheads101, and today I'm going to be showing you a little feature of iChat that not a lot of people know about, but it is very useful, and it's also funny to do as a prank to your friends.

This feature allows you to make it so iChat will automatically accept video chats, audio chats, screen sharings, file transfers, you name it. Um, and there are actually two ways to do it, and I'll be showing you both of those ways.

So, go into iChat, and this is the first way. Go into iChat, go up to the iChat menu, tap on Preferences, go to Alerts. Now we're going to be making it, for this example, so it automatically accepts audio chats. So, I'll go ahead down to audio invitation and check this box that says run an AppleScript.

Now, for the AppleScript, you set auto_accept.applescript that comes pre-installed on your computer, so it'll all be there; it's all good. Now, uh, our next step will be to have someone invite us to an audio chat. So here's my friend Tovia, and he's going to invite us to an audio chat.

So, you see right there; he invited. I didn't do anything, and it accepted like that, so it was amazing. Uh, someone, if you did this to someone's computer when they didn't know about it, and then you just invited them to an audio chat, they'd probably be pretty surprised because, uh, they wouldn't be expecting it.

Now I'm gonna end this, and I'll also show you there are a couple other things you can do. You can set it for video invitation; you can do exactly the same thing. You could do it for a screen sharing invitation, um, you know, any of those kind of things, and it is very helpful for that.

Okay, so now I've showed you the easy way of doing this for all of the buddies on your buddy list. But a common use for this is, let's say you're going out of town, and you want to be able to connect to your computer at home. You might leave iChat open and then screen share with it and have it automatically accept screen sharing invitations so you can see what's going on on the screen and send yourself files, etc.

In order to do this, it's actually pretty simple. You could use this method through the iChat preferences, but then anyone who knows about the screen name could just invite the screen screen name to a screen sharing and see your screen, and that's very insecure.

So, you can actually filter these auto-accept events for any given buddy on your buddy list. So I'll be doing that with my buddy Tovia. So first, you'll right-click on your buddy and then go to Show Info.

Okay, and now here's the info window, all nice and dandy. It'll go to the Alerts tab, and then, in this case, we're gonna have it for invitation to share my screen because when he asks to share my screen, I want it to automatically accept.

So now I'll go down to run AppleScript, check that, set it to auto_accept.applescript, and I will go ahead and close this info window. So now, when Tovia invites me to a screen sharing, which you will now do, it automatically accepts.

And what do you know? He's on my screen! I didn't have to do anything, so my computer could have been sitting here with no one at it, and he could screen share with me. If someone else invites me to a screen sharing, since I did it specifically for him, um, it wouldn't work; it wouldn't automatically accept. I'd still have to accept like normal, which is why this is such a great feature.

So that is two ways of doing it. So thanks for watching; I hope this helped a lot of you. Please subscribe and check out our other videos, and goodbye!