Mac Trick: Using Screen Sharing outside of iChat
8:20PM, February 05, 2008 - [ Permalink]
After the Billings demo by Sam at Sunday's ByMUG meeting using Screen Sharing, I decided to look into it for use here at home - where I have three Macs - my G5, my MacBook Pro and my wife's Mac mini.
From time to time, Tracey asks me about something on her machine, which, up until now, necessitated me to get up, and walk over to her machine and have a look-see at what she is talking about, or to change something on her system that she isn't comfortable doing.
Now that I have Screen Sharing set up, it is a piece of cake to do. Normally, this requires to have iChat on, but a bit of Google-fu shows there is (as always) another way.
UsingMac.com has a great article about how you can do this.
First thing, though is that you need to open System Preferences and select Sharing. To turn on screen sharing, just click the check box beside Screen Sharing. If you would like to restrict who can control your screen, click the Computer Settings button on the right and click the VNC viewers may control screen with password, and enter a password (which really shouldn't be your user login password for the sake of security).
To make your experience in Screen Sharing much easier, open up Terminal (either use Spotlight or go into Applications/Utilities/) and copy&paste these two lines in:
defaults write com.apple.ScreenSharing ShowBonjourBrowser_Debug 1
and then
defaults write com.apple.ScreenSharing 'NSToolbar Configuration ControlToolbar' -dict-add 'TB Item Identifiers' '(Scale,Control,Share,Curtain,Capture,
FullScreen,GetClipboard,SendClipboard,Quality)'
They add some features to the program that you will likely find rather useful - like Bonjour discovery. Now, to find the application, you need to open Finder to Mac HD/System/Library/CoreServices/Screen Sharing.app. When you double click it, it will open up a window that will show you the machines in you can connect to.
Before you go any further, this is an excellent opportunity to right click / control click the Screen Sharing icon and select "Keep in Dock" to you will be able to find it easily in the future.
Once you have logged into a machine, you can see what they are talking about, or make the required changes without having to take off your headphones or leave the comfort of your desk. Or, you can show someone else in the office something without either you having to go to them or vise-versa.
Imagine the fun of logging into your wife's machine and setting the background image to change every five seconds... because you can. ;-)
