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ScreenSharingMenulet fills a gap in Snow Leopard's Screen Sharing.app

by TJ Luoma Sep 20th 2009 at 9:30PM

Every "point-oh" version of Mac OS X usually brings some small bit of pain, as I find some little utility no longer works. Snow Leopard has been no exception. I had been using the version of Screen Sharing from 10.5.4 because it had some "hidden" features which I liked. Unfortunately those "hidden" features were also "unsupported" features. When 10.5.5 came out, they were gone, but I continued to use the version of Screen Sharing from 10.5.4 which worked until 10.5.8. Sadly for me, it does not work at all in 10.6.

The biggest drawback of Screen Sharing was the removal of the Bonjour Browser, which showed a list of computers available for Screen Sharing (both locally and via Back to My Mac). Now I had to type them in manually, which isn't such a big deal when you are trying to connect to a machine on a local network. If you are trying to connect over the Internet, however, you need to use the full hostname, which may look something like this: macbook.yourname.members.mac.com. Plus, it just seems like one of those things that the computer ought to do for me. [Side note, if you are looking for a handy way to see all the Bonjour services on your local network, check out Tildesoft's free Bonjour Browser utility.]

While looking through a bunch of old files in my ~/Downloads/ folder, I found a version of ScreenSharingMenulet. I checked its webpage and saw what I was looking for: "ScreenSharingMenulet 1.7.1 and higher is compatible to Mac OS 10.6 Snow Leopard." ScreenSharingMenulet sits in the menu bar along with your other menu extras. Simply click on its icon (shown above) and choose which computer you wish to connect to via a dropdown list. In my testing it worked very well over a LAN although it did not seem to pre-populate with the machines over the Internet. Given the flakiness of Back To My Mac over ther Internet, I can hardly fault this program for that shortcoming.

ScreenSharingMenulet is free (donations accepted) from Stefan Klieme who has several other handy-looking utilities at his website. If you use Screen Sharing a lot, it's definitely a handy tool to have around.

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lanejasper69

www.teamviewer.com "Teamviewer" Rules! It connects to and from Mac/Pc works with Snow Leopard and Win 7 and I use it every day! Free for personal, but 299.00 (I believe) for commercial which is too pricey, but I only use it for personal stuff. no nags, no pop-ups, reminders etc. just works. You can even set your own password instead of it automatically re-creating one for each session in the free version. I found it works best for me personally and no platform dependencies, its awesome I think. And no I don' work for them, I just hate TB2 anymore, Remote Desktop is too big an app and costly and for a simple file transfer or remote login scenario Teamviewer does everything I need it to.

September 21 2009 at 7:34 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to lanejasper69's comment
lanejasper69

OH, and no port forwarding etc. to deal with either.

September 21 2009 at 7:35 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Mystic

Yeah nothing has changed here. I still see my home iMac on the sidebar, even when it's sleeping!! Woo hoo!

Works great.

September 21 2009 at 12:06 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
cecil

I use ScreenSharingMenulet all the time and love it. Thanks for this write up. I would like more people to know about and use it so development will continue.

September 21 2009 at 12:05 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Pierre

What sucks is if you used those features and the last setting you used before updating was b&w display mode, I'm stuck there :(. However, this indicates that the preferences are still there, just the code was removed from the nib file. It's still in a plist file somewhere I think... Now, where are the hackers?

September 21 2009 at 10:31 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
davidjwalsh

A side question to this

I'm 99% sure in 10.5 one could type on one's home LAN "ssh macbook" and connect to said machine.
With the advent of 10.6 it seems one now needs to type "ssh macbook.local" has something changed or is a change somewhere needed.

Incidentally - pleasant find.

September 21 2009 at 8:48 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to davidjwalsh's comment
brian

Ever since Bonjour/Rendezvous came out in 10.2, I've always needed .local, unless I had an entry in /etc/hosts.

September 21 2009 at 10:56 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Frank

I find Screen Sharing.app nice, but for day to day use I think JollysFastVNC is much better. It's also contantly updated with new features - features which aren't in danger of going away based on Apple's whims.

http://www.jinx.de/JollysFastVNC.html

Also, the vnc:// protocol works for whichever VNC program you choose (think: safari bookmark on the bookmark bar)


Frank

September 21 2009 at 8:14 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to Frank's comment
Jeff

another vote for Jolly - works great. Bonjour support rocks.

September 22 2009 at 1:29 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
robogobo

The function of the Bonjour browser is still there, just in another place. 10.5 moved Screen Sharing via Bonjour to the Sidebar, under Shared. Click on a machine and you'll see "Share Screen" at the top of the window under the toolbar.

Also, if you want to store favorites to connect non-Bonjourly, those go under the Go>Connect to Server (cmd-K), where you can add as many servers as you want for Screen Sharing (vnc://), File Sharing (afp://) or FTP (read only, ftp://).

The Bonjour browser was nice, but it was also broken, wanting to save any and every server to favorites by default.

September 21 2009 at 6:31 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Schmeric

I'm using a .netloc-link-file that I call with a Quicksilver hotkey. There is no faster and more convenient way. ;)

September 21 2009 at 3:35 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
jbrown510

Personally I still miss the Bonjour Browser from Screen Sharing... but these do help fill part of the the void. Creating a bookmark shortcut in my dock helped too (I only have two machines I regularly connect to so it's not so bad).

September 21 2009 at 2:53 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Phillip

I don't quite understand the issue here, Mac OS has screen sharing built in? I just click the computer I want and click the 'Screen sharing' button in the top right of the finder window. Works in 10.5 & 10.6

September 21 2009 at 1:57 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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