Replacements for the lost screen sharing Bonjour browser

Dec 22, '09 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: robg

Back when 10.5 came out, this hint about enabling the screen sharing Bonjour browser was quite popular. Unfortunately, Apple disabled this very useful feature at some point during 10.5's life cycle, and it doesn't work in 10.6, either. In the course of my travels through the submission queue and Macworld's Mac Gems columns, I've come across a couple of possible replacements for this functionality.

First, there's Screen Sharing Launcher, an open source app that lets you add local computers to a list of available servers. When you want to screen share with another Mac, you just launch Screen Sharing Launcher instead, then select the desired machine.

This is a relatively new project, and it's not yet feature complete -- for instance, you can add machines to the list, but not remove them via the GUI. To remove them, you can edit the preferences file (with any pure text editor) directly; it's named net.curby.ScreenSharingLauncher.txt, and located in your user's Library » Preferences folder.

The other solution, and the one I've been personally using, is ScreenSharingMenulet, which is a faceless application that adds a new icon to the menu bar. Local hosts will show up automatically in the menu, or you can manually enter a host and add it to the My Computers section of the menu. Dan Frakes covered this app in an earlier Mac Gems column. The site's home page also lists two hidden preferences for controlling the display of IP addresses and the number of recent servers in the menu.

If you're aware of other replacements for the Bonjour browser, please list them in the comments...

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