Beem me up Scotty!

Teleport for OS X – £FREE (Donation-ware)

Ok, so i am lucky enough that at work my setup includes a 24” iMac, a secondary monitor to the left of this and my MacBook on the right hand side. Until yesterday i had, not so much struggled (as this implies my life was made considerably more difficult as a result; a bit of an overstatement), but more accurately, put up with leaning over towards the back of my desk whenever i needed to work on my laptop; this always felt like it should have been far less effort than it actually was. I am also aware that the ergonomically conscious of you out there are gasping in horror at this image, but never fear…

As a result, when Phil advised me about a small Preference Pane for OS X called Synergy, my ears pricked up. Synergy is a (multi platform) tool that allows you to control two or more networked machines with a single mouse and keyboard. Problem solved, sounds pretty straight forward right? WRONG! Actually getting Synergy to work on my two (Leapord 10.5.5) machines proved to be a lot harder than I am sure it’s supposed to. I wrestled with Synergy on a approximately three separate occasions before delving into the Google jungle to see if any other similar tools existed.

Not long into my exploration I came across Teleport. Teleport (OS X only) does exactly what Synergy is supposed to, but in my opinion executes it far better and without any of the hassle. As with Synergy, Teleport is a simple Preference Pane with three different tabs for screen alignment, security and options.

IMPORTANT: The instructions below must be completed on each machine you would like to control with your mouse and keyboard, unless indicated otherwise.

1. Download the Teleport preference pane. Download
2. Unzip and double click: teleport.prefPane to install into System Preferences.
3. Inside the new Teleport pane on System Preferences, select “Activate teleport”. ONLY on the machine you would like to connect to, select “Share this Mac”.
4. Accept the invite from the host on the shared machine.
5. Align the new screen accordingly on the host machine.

SIMPLE AS THAT!
You should now be able to freely glide your mouse across multiple screens and thump out text on each of your machines until your fingers go numb.

SELL IT TO ME:
One of the key selling points of Teleport is the fact that you can also sync Paste boards and drag and drop files between machines. Without question, a very helpful tool.