10.5: Add useful toolbar buttons to Screen Sharing
Dec 10, '07 07:30:08AM
Contributed by: djwtwo
In Mac OS X 10.5's Screen Sharing app (the Share Screen button when viewing a Mac in the SHARED section of the Finder's sidebar), you can enable toolbar buttons that will put you in full-screen mode (like Apple Remote Desktop) or allow you to "curtain" (hide the screen of) the remote Mac. You'll need to have the Property List Editor installed, which is part of the Developer Tools included with Leopard. To add the toolbar buttons, you should:
- Make sure that you've used the screen sharing feature in Leopard at least once to ensure that a prefs file is created. Quit it if it is running already.
- At the command line (in Terminal.app or an xterm) enter the following, all on one line:
open -a "Property List Editor.app" ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.ScreenSharing.plist
- In the property list editor which should then open, navigate the tree to Root » NSToolbar Configuration ControlToolbar » TB Item Identifiers.
- Select one of the children of the TB Item Itentifiers node, and press Add Sibling. I selected the Scale child, which places the toolbar button after the scale/don't scale toolbar button already in the toolbar.
- Set the Class of your new entry to String from the pop-up (which it may default to), and the Value to FullScreen.
- Press Add Sibling again, set the Class to String, and the Value to Curtain.
- Save your changes, and open a new Screen Sharing session.
Start a sharing session and make sure the toolbar is visible (View » Show Toolbar, or click the button at the top right of the screen. You'll see your new Full Screen button in the toolbar. Click it, and you will be switched into a full screen mode very much like the one in Apple Remote Desktop; click the "X" icon in the toolbar to exit full screen mode.
The Curtain button will hide the display on the actual Mac you're sharing, replacing it with a large lock icon and some text you specify.
[robg adds: Hints user bdog noted in a comment on our queue site notes that there are four additional buttons you can add to the toolbar (all of Class String): Quality, Capture, Control, and Share. Quality adds a slider that lets you vary the image quality (and hence speed of the shared screen); Capture takes a local screenshot of the remote Mac, Control toggles the mode from "you control everything" to "you observe everything," and Share lets you toggle whether the other machine's mouse and keyboard are active while you're in sharing mode. These are all features of the full Apple Remote Desktop program, I believe.
In my testing, they worked reasonably well, but not perfectly. For instance, the first time I used Curtain mode, the remote Mac locked with a solid blue screen. After I restarted it, though, Curtain mode worked, but the text display exhibited a bug -- I entered "Controlled by robg..." and the onscreen display read "Controlled by robg....lockedByString." But in general, all these features work well, and they add welcomed functionality to screen sharing.
Finally, you can still use the Customize Toolbar option within Screen Sharing and you won't lose these new buttons -- as long as you don't drag them off, obviously, or drag in the default toolbar choice.]
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Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20071127183240696