Monday, September 28, 2009

When OS X truly sucks: screen sharing

I tried OS X screen sharing again today.

I do this every few months, to remind myself how badly OS X screen sharing sucks.

Yeah, I'm on Leopard, but from all I read Snow Leopard takes OS X remote control from extremely lousy to really lousy.

It's painful for a Mac user to remember that Microsoft Remote Desktop Services (similar to Citrix remote desktop) is about ten years old.

Microsoft (Citrix?) used to have some serious skills.

Update: Speaking of Apple senescence, I remember when the OS could 'remember' the location of files stored on a server and mount the server on demand. Now if I click a shortcut to a network folder I get "A volume failed to mount". Once upon a time I'd get a login.

That capability was lost in the last few years of OS X development, one of several dumbing-down changes to the OS.

3 comments:

chrismealy said...

Grrrr. That network shortcut bug drives me crazy.

JGF said...

It feels like OS X is getting senile.

Charlie Stross said...

Screen sharing under OS X is basically VNC, which has been around for years -- you can improve on it easily enough by simply installing your own VNC server and client (on the appropriate machines). Whether even VNC is good enough, though ... OS X seems to completely lack the ability to serve separate graphical login sessions simultaneously, something X11 has had since the early 80s!