I’ve been experimenting with the Mac Snow Leopard Screen Sharing capability and it’s really terrific for managing our workgroup server, but every time I want to run it I have to launch Server Tools, then select the server, then choose “Screen Sharing”. Isn’t there a better way?
Dave’s Answer:
We also have a Snow Leopard Mac OS X server in our offices and unlike a regular Mac system, the server version includes all sorts of interesting additional features and capabilities, one of the most interesting of which is the ability to seamlessly operate it remotely from elsewhere on your network.
Our office is powered by a Time Capsule which gives us 802.11n wi-fi throughput at a good clip, certainly enough that I can actually watch movies via the Screen Sharing capability (though, alas, audio isn’t piped through so it’s only good for silent movies!).
Launching it is definitely a pain in the booty, though. What I’d love is an icon on my desktop that is a shortcut to launching the sharing app with my server already specified. It turns out you can do just that, but it’s a bit tricky…
Start by going to any Finder window and clicking on the name of the server:
Now, once you’re looking at the server window, even if it is still trying to resolve the connection, notice that instead of the usual “Connect As…” notice that there’s a second button there too:
Click on “Share Screen…” and you’ll see your sharing screen show up:
Here’s the trick: click and drag on the icon next to the server name in the window title, as you can see here:
That’s it. It’s not necessarily a pretty icon, but it’ll do the job:
Oh, and you can change the icon to make it prettier too. Here’s what you do: click once on the icon then choose File –> Get Info. You’ll see something like this:
Now find a picture you like, perhaps on Google Images, then Ctrl-Click on the picture or photo and chose “Copy Image”. Now click once on the tiny icon in the Get Info window and use Cmd-V to paste the image into the icon space:
Now my icon’s very nice:
That’s how ya do it. Hope that’s helpful!!
