10.5: Create a direct Screen Sharing shortcut icon

Mar 17, '08 07:30:04AM

Contributed by: calum

I was trying to figure out a way to open a screen sharing connection to a particular server on my LAN from a Dock or desktop icon. Being able to do it by entering a vnc:// URI in Finder or Safari was okay, and the hidden Bonjour Browser was one step better. But when I accidentally dragged and dropped an entry from the Bonjour Browser to my desktop, guess what happened? It created an icon that I could double-click to open a screen sharing session!

This file is just a plist with a .vncloc extension that opens with Finder.app by default. It looks like this, if you want to create your own:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
	<key>URL</key>
	<string>vnc://your.server.here</string>
</dict>
</plist>
[robg adds: This works as described, though I'd say it opens Screen Sharing, not Finder.app, by default.]

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