Working With Two or More Macs on One Screen
January 16th, 2008One of the commenters asked if I would be connecting my laptop (a 13 month-old MacBook Pro) up to my new Mac Pro. I had planned on using iChat’s Screen Sharing since both machines are running Mac OS X 10.5.1. My main reason for sharing screens was that I wanted to keep my email on the laptop and not have to sync two machines. I know about IMAP, but I’m not Google, and server hard drive space is best left to important things like images and content, not for messages about enlargement of body parts. Besides, I’ve been burned with storage issues and IMAP before, it just seems easier to have mail on one machine and call it good.
After a day of marveling that I could work on two machines out of the box with little nerdery, I began to see a few shortcomings. The first is that I don’t like the way iChat moves the shared screen front and center and reduces the non-shared machine to a tiny window. I want to share the screen, but I wanted access to my main machine and have the shared machine in a window I could move around. I also wanted to share clipboards between the Mac Pro and the MacBook Pro, something that I never figured how to do using Screen Sharing via iChat. When I worked in an office and had a PC laptop (residing on a PC network) and a Mac, I used to use a simple app to access Windows machines using a Microsoft app called Remote Desktop Connection, which was a pretty good way to browser test and move files around. I never had a very powerful PC at my desk, so it was a bit of a laggard and requires a good admin from IT to have your Windows set up correctly to get working, but I loved that the PC was in its own window.
After searching around, I found this amazing tip that is pure gold for sharing screens with other Macs on your network. If users have Screen Sharing turned on in their Sharing preferences pane:
you’ll see them when you run the Screen Sharing app found in /System/Library/CoreServices. The Screen Sharing application icon looks like this:
If you follow the tip, the screen sharing window includes all kinds of settings for clipboard sharing (host machine and shared machine), window size, window render quality, screen capturing of shared machine screen and the ability to lock down the machine while sharing. Basically, it’s like Apple Remote Desktop without the overhead and cost.
My Mac Pro is wired to the router via Ethernet and the MacBook Pro is using 802.11n to connect to the router (a D-Link).
I couldn’t be happier with the performance and I’m stoked with how great it is to work on multiple machines in this way. Tasty. o
Tags: apple, mac, MacOS 10.5, screen sharing
Not quite what the title of your post indicates, but you might want to check out Synergy (http://synergy2.sourceforge.net/). It’s excellent.
Also refer to Scott Bom’s guide to hacking the existing Screen Sharing interface to be more robust (though this is very much unsupported by Apple at present due to bugginess):
http://www.wishingline.com/notebook/2007/12/hiddenscreensharingfeatures/
I love screen share. I use it to trade files, turn on iPhoto (we keep all the photos in one library & I pull out certain ones for editing and blogging) from my MacBook, which is usually in the living room, to my iMac in the office-nursery several times a day. It is far easier (for me) than using Remote Desktop, which is how we did it prior to Leopard.
There’s also things like Chicken of the VNC:
http://www.macminicolo.net/Mac_VNC_tutor.html
I know you’re speaking English Jon, beyond that? I have one Mac, one screen and sometimes my daughter or a friend and I might look at it at the same time. Is that kind of the same thing?
I use VNC, love it. http://www.realvnc.com But the previous comment suggest it is already built in. I’m on PC, so have no clue about Mac.
Jaap: It appear to be built into Leopard (OS X 10.5), I use it in 10.4
Oh how I wish I understood what you were talking about - I know my computer life would be so much simpler and more elegant. I’ll just keep reading and hope I catch on…
this is good stuff…. but the only thing I’d probably use it for is to access the iSight on the remote computer to see what’s going on in the other room.
I’m lazy.
I’m so tempted to buy a Mac (have always been a Windows PC user) but worry that I won’t be able to transfer all the software I’ve bought over the years onto their operating system. Macs are works of art, that much is clear. So clean, so streamlined.
In other news, I have a T-bone Time Capsule on order. Ships Feb 29 to arrive Mar 6.
I’ll let you know how Time Machine performs wirelessly.
I’ll send my 6-month old Airport Extreme to my daughter!
You could also pick up the free app, Teleport which lets you use one mouse and one keyboard on 2 screens!
Hey John,
I use screen sharing all the time, and it has annoyed me that the system won’t let me make a alias.
Digging around some forums today I happened upon this trick.
Just put vnc://address_of_target_machine into the safari URL bar and it auto launches Screen Sharing. Also makes bookmarking easy.
Pretty Dope.