Add Features To Screen Sharing

When you're at your desk, or have your laptop with you, remote control of other Macintosh computers is easy with Apple Remote Desktop. When you're running from desk to desk, trying to solve everybody's problems before their next big deadline, remote support can be a little trickier.

Leopard's new Screen Sharing feature is a big help. Browse to the "Shared" section of the Finder sidebar, and you can select the machine you'd like to control. Click the "Screen Sharing" button that appears in that window, and type in a username and password.

The only drawback is that Remote Desktop features like curtain mode (which shields the screen from all but the remote user), quality control (which allows you to adjust the appropriate color depth for your bandwidth), and full screen rendering aren't available in the basic Screen Sharing application. At least, not by default.

To take advantage of the full complement of remote control features (though none of Remote Desktop's deployment or reporting functionality), you simply need to edit the screen sharing preferences. Log in as an administrative user, and in the Terminal type the following, replacing FEATURESET with a comma-separated list of any of the following controls you'd like to add: Scale, Control, Share, Curtain, Capture, FullScreen, GetClipboard, SendClipboard, and Quality.

defaults write com.apple.ScreenSharing \
'NSToolbar Configuration ControlToolbar' -dict-add \
'TB Item Identifiers' '(FEATURESET)'

If you find yourself using these features often from machines other than your own, you may wish to simplify things even further, and add Screen Sharing to the administrative account's Dock. Simply drag it onto the Dock from it's home in /System/Library/CoreServices/, being careful not to move the original.

Now you've got 90% of Remote Desktop's troubleshooting tools on every desktop, without having to pay for additional licenses.