It's actually using a VNC based application, and uses the VNC protocol. I can "remote desktop" into my desktop using a simple VNC app on my iPad.
It seems that they've provided the option of creating a new VNC server/desktop process when connecting in, rather than just attaching to the existing and current desktop.
For the record, this has been a feature of VNC/X forever; in fact, it's harder to run VNC on an extant X session than it is to just start a new one specifically for VNC.
It's just a little annoying when Apple finally integrates tech that's 20+ years old and gets heralded as being "ahead of the curve" or "very cool" for doing it.
Get pissy much? I consider it "very cool" in the sense that this is a cool feature that I finally get to use in the OS I prefer to work in.
I don't care if it's been around for decades or done a thousand times before on other OS's, it's being done by them now, and I find it useful.
I'd rather see them do stuff like this and be praised for it than do stuff like this and get shit on by people with the tiresome "it's about time" or "Linux had this a zillion years ago and did it better" crowd.
Actually, I won't have the same attitude... I'll be indifferent, and not comment at all, as I don't really care what Windows does. Even though I use it almost daily for various client work.
When it comes right down to it, I don't buy into this whole OS religion thing. I've had more than a passing exposure to quite a few of them, and they all have/had their place.
Case in point, I started my career on IBM 3081's and PDP-11's. I even have a full rack of gear in my home office that includes a bunch of boxes with various flavours of Linux installed, a Tadpole laptop running Solaris, an operational NeXT Cube, SGI and HP boxes running their Unix variants, a cluster of Sun Netras, and on and on. I've also got a few different laptops with Windows and Linux installed. And a couple of MacBook Pro's.
They all have good features, and bad, but none of them have everything.
Do I care what someone else uses? Nope. Do I care if they gush over it and think it's the coolest thing ever? Nope. Do I feel some overwhelming urge to "educate" them on why their choices are "wrong"? Nope.
I just know what works for me, and am happy to discuss things with like-minded individuals. I'm not a fanboy, and I haven't drunk the Cool-Aid. I also don't think everyone who owns a Mac is like that either.
It's an UltraBookIIe. Needed it when I provisioned 6 racks of Sun gear in an off-shore co-lo for a gaming company, and it was the easiest way to auto install/configure all the OS's and software into bare metal gear. Wasn't the fastest thing on the planet, but it worked really well.
You're damn straight I'm calling you crazy, running Solaris on a Tadpole Sparcbook - If you're running a Sparcbook or even a Sparcbook 2, Solaris is just too slow to reasonably run - choose life, choose SunOS 4.1.3.
Dude, if you're ever in the UK I owe you a beer. Heck, many beers.
To be fair, the main problems I had with Solaris on SPARCbook 2 were more to do with Java being too slow and Sun's insistence on making everything Java-i-fied around the time I was using it.
I'm similarly OS-agnostic in terms of performance and usually recommend Apple gear for people with no preferences. But it still bugs me when people bray about 'revolutionary Apple products' that are really just Apple joining the party. This 'amazing new thing' gets shoved in my face that has been around for ages and I'm supposed to mollify them with vapid oohs and ahs.
Or if someone asks me why I've got an android phone and not an iphone and I casually respond that I don't like the way Apple devices get locked to iTunes, I get groans and eye-rolls. Fuck that shit, you ask me a question and then you socially punish me because I prefer to go a different way, damn right I get pissed off at the 'Apple Cult'.
Fanboys of all stripes are painful as hell, and the Apple Fanboy Cult is currently ascendent, that's all.
OK. As long as you have the same attitude when Microsoft implements the Dock for Windows users, and everyone says, "Microsoft is really cool, this is a great new feature! Way to go Microsoft", without any acknowledgment of the origin.
It's just the whole culture around Mac. Apple gets lavished and rewarded, heralded as "clairvoyant" (the term used in a big thread yesterday about iPad) and similar silly pronouncements, seemingly no matter what they do -- whether the idea and existing implementations are older than the average age of Apple's workforce or not. People go around with Apple bumper stickers and define themselves by their association with the Apple brand. They hire people and choose friends based on whether the candidates use a Mac. And, when Apple finally implements an old idea, they are super awesome for getting around to it 20 years after almost everyone else.
It's just a bit annoying for those of us not infected, I guess.
(I have a MacBook Pro, for the record. I run Arch Linux on it. This has caused several Mac fanboys much distress.)
I'm sure there are. I'm not one of these, generally. I carry around a MBP and consequently display the Apple logo everywhere I use that. I just don't buy into the dogma or the reality distortion field that makes some hail an old style of VNC implementation as innovative and awesome.
I think it all boils down to levels of tech-savvyness. My mother wouldn't know where to start with a VNC what-you-ma-call-it, but by clicking a button that says "See your desktop and files" makes Apple awesome.
Besides, I think there is something valuable in making tech simple. Generally, the applause for Apple is misplaced under "look at feature/concept X" when it should be placed under "feature/concept X 50% simpler".
Well first, pretty much every tech is 20+ years old before it is packaged for the general public. Remember Douglas Engelbart?
Second, this has been Apple's post NeXt philosophy, and it is much better than the Not Invented Here philosophy that preceded it. Many OS X features are simply a better user interface for some Unix feature or other.
Apple should be applauded for this. Too much great technology has failed to make a difference in the lives of Muggles because of the incomprehensible incantations required to invoke it.
Yes, but people are reluctant to give credit for feature ideas in implementations that they feel to be inadequate. The Linux GUI has traditionally been one of the biggest objections people have to the whole operating system (though it seems to be less so lately), so they don't get credit for most of the features of their GUI. Similarly, Apple rarely gets credit for introducing digital photography to the consumer space because few people knew or cared about their camera product.
To offer an alternate perspective: This will likely be a new thing to lots of people who aren't very technologically literate.
It's just a cop-out. The GUI on Linux has been good for a long time -- certainly comparable to Windows, which ripped KDE4 off much more directly than OS X in Vista and 7. People just make excuses for things. Remmina and Vinagre both make it easy to connect to "Jeff on Box 1", "John on Box 1", "WALMART on WALMART Box". You just have to add the IP address and give it a name, and you have to have an IP address to connect on OS X too.
"You just have to add the IP address and give it a name, and you have to have an IP address to connect on OS X too."
I will be curious to see if you actually need to know your IP address. This seems like exactly the kind of thing Apple would abstract away for the user, which is one reason why many people are willing to pay a premium for OS X over Linux.
If you're on the same LAN or conbecting to another computer using the same MobileMe account you don't need to find the IP. Both cases use Bonjour/zeroconf.
You generally have to. Another guy replied with a few circumstances where zeroconf will broadcast the availability, and vinagre at least supports zeroconf so it would work fine with that. Outside of a LAN or MobileMe tunnel, you have to have an IP address or DNS record. Most people aren't going to set up dyndns, so it'll be an IP address.
> It doesn't matter how old the tech is. Apple is bringing it to the masses and nobody has done that before.
Nobody has done that before, except for a company with about 90% of the Desktop market share, first party remote desktop services, a third party market with services to 'go to your pc', implementations of some sort of VNC-type service and goodness knows what else to secure it all.
Puh-leese. Apple is "bringing it to the masses", where I guess masses qualifies as < 10% of the desktop market, only because Apple has larger marketshare than anyone who has done it before.
This stuff has been part of every Linux distribution for years. People have even written shiny interfaces for it, see remmina or vinagre or any other remote desktop management suite (and yes, these ship with many distributions by default).
That OS X has more marketshare than Linux shouldn't automatically make OS X more "cool" on its own merits; after all, Windows has 8-9x as much marketshare as OS X, but I don't see a bunch of threads pop up lavishing MS with praise every time they integrate a new feature into Windows.
I don't think Apple should be hailed as super cool and great by technical people just for finally getting around to doing something that has been done thousands of times before for decades. I can understand an ignorant person thinking a feature that's not found in Windows makes Apple "cool", but it's silly for anyone browsing Hacker News to ascribe a bunch of street cred to Apple for this.
It's a nice feature and I'm glad to see it go in, it's nice that Apple is adding nice features, but I'm not going to sit here and pretend like Apple is the coolest kid on the block just because they finally got around to writing a semi-normal implementation of VNC, just as my mind wasn't blown when Apple finally integrated workspaces after 15-20+ years of availability on all other respectable WMs. It's more of an "about time" than an "Apple is consummately cool".
I appreciate that the pieces have been around for a while but the fact that you think tools such as remmina[1] are appropriate for the masses indicates that you don't quite get it. One has to type in a "server" to connect to a remote machine in remmina, and at that point the average user is already lost.
If you think I'm giving Apple "street cred", whatever that means, you've misunderstood me. If you think I'm hailing Apple as "the coolest kid on the block" indicates that you may not be looking at this situation objectively. Please don't put words into my mouth.
By bringing something to the masses I mean making it accessible to less technical users. It's available and usable by anyone, just because OS X doesn't have 80% market doesn't make it any less available. I really feel that you have misunderstood me on many levels. It's apparent that you're tired of people hailing Apple for no good reason but I have not done so, so don't take it out on me. I'm not a blind Apple fanatic.
IIRC, one of the negatives about Ubuntu choosing to move away from X11 towards Unity is that they will be losing the network-friendliness for remote screens for which X11 is specifically designed.
X Windows was designed around running multiple thin-clients as a primary purpose. Wiki says X started in 1984, with X11 being released in 1987 - it'll be 24 years old this year.
I think you mean Wayland not Unity, and I don't think its mainly Ubuntu pushing it. There probably are some issues with unity and network transparency due to dbus use for shell components(and I think the universal menu) but that's a separate issue.
My mistake, swap in Wayland. Most of the moaning I've heard on the web about it is from Ubuntu - probably because I use debian and watch those crowds more.
It seems that they've provided the option of creating a new VNC server/desktop process when connecting in, rather than just attaching to the existing and current desktop.
Very cool.