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Apple Releases Remote Desktop 3
Dan Uricoli writes to tell us MacFixIt is reporting that today Apple computer has released remote desktop 3 " Some of the new or updated features include; a Remote Spotlight search, Dashboard widget, Curtain mode, user history reports, and more.
Using ARD as a VNC server was "challenging" enough that everyone just installed the open source osxvnc instead.
Improvements were in order.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
This is still hundreds of dollars. While Microsoft's Remote Desktop product is still free with most versions of Windows, and Linux still comes with Remote Desktop like functionality still universally built in. And heck, even on OS X you can rig something for free if you're willing to muck about with configuring VNC.
I can't help but think this is taking Apple Remote Desktop from something that would be a great and useful tool to something ignored and forgotten. Apple doesn't seem to realize that "mac networks" as not-infrequently existed ten years ago don't exist at all anymore. There are no longer Mac system administrators chomping at the bit for improved software to administer and keep track of their networks. The Mac's primary problem in that realm right now is just convincing system administrators to use it, or even in some cases just convincin them to allow a mac on their Windows-only network. Those networks that are mac-only are likely small and running on a shoestring budget. In these contexts, what use is it to commit resources to something like Apple Remote Desktop? It seems like the kind of thing that's a great solution in a large-scale mac-only network, but that's the kind of thing that only exists anymore... at Apple Computer's headquarters. It's kind of like SunRay, Sun's fantastic thin client solution which Sun's own offices use, and no-one else anywhere does.
If Apple moved Remote Desktop into the OS and made it free and universal, like Linux and Windows do, I'm sure it would be widely used. But as an expensive standalone... hell, I've never even encountered someone who uses this thing. You can't simultaneously beg for customers and try to charge those customers $499.
Yeah, slashdot has this great system, where you can click on special text called Hyperlinks which take you to a site with more detailed information than the Summary. Try it, linking is fun!
"Don't want your admin tasks to be seen? No problem, turn on the new Curtain Mode to block the local user's view of their desktop. This is perfect when you're updating a public display."
It would of course be fun to have a curtain drop on the user's screen. Fix what the user screwed up and then have the curtain and "house lights" go up with a ta-da! sound. The mystery of how IT performs its functions is safe.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Really? Sorry to hear that they serve you some gimped version of the page. The one they give me includes things like:
Remote Spotlight search
Leveraging the revolutionary Spotlight technology in Mac OS X Tiger, the new Remote Spotlight capability in Apple Remote Desktop 3 can perform lightning fast searches on remote client systems running Mac OS X v10.4 or later. Summary results for each client are updated instantly as results are returned. View details on results, or refine searches even further using additional qualifiers. Results can be viewed on remote client systems, copied back to your administrator system, or deleted.
Dashboard widget
Apple Remote Desktop 3 provides you with a new Dashboard widget that gives you an instant, at-a-glance view of the remote computers in your network. It's fully integrated with the Apple Remote Desktop administrative application, so a click on a particular computer will allow you to select and start working with any computer in the system.
Curtain Mode
For those times when you want your actions to be hidden from the end user, there's Curtain Mode. This allows you to block the view behind a virtual curtain, while retaining full control of the screen. It's perfect for those working on public-facing systems.
I'll be here until about six, if there are any other pages you'd like me to copy and paste for you today.
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Yeah, but a lot of schools do. And this program (and ANAT before that) are godsends for anyone administering a large amount of Macs.
This guy's the limit!
In the paragraph directly beneath that picture: Thanks to screen sharing, you can observe one, 10, even 50 screens in action simultaneously, allowing you to closely monitor your network. And that's your entire network -- not just Macs -- you can also view and control the screens of any Virtual Network Computing (VNC)-enabled computer, including Windows, Linux, and UNIX. When a user needs assistance, you take control of any individual screen and view the remote desktop in full-screen mode.
Computers allow humans to make mistakes at the fastest speeds known, with the possible exception of tequila and handguns
This is a full-fledged adminstrative tool.
You can observe multiple computers, send UNIX commands to Mac OS X clients. (3.0 is 10.3.9 and Tiger only if I remember right), install packages on multiple computers, copy files to multiple computers, shut down, wake up, sleep, restart, search for files, install packages.
And new in 3.0 (Deuce) is remote spotlight searching, user history reports, and some automator and applescripting for (albeit limited) automation. There's also some nice UI improvements, things like being able to save task templates and remote drag-and-drop (drag a file from the computer you're controlling onto your desktop and vice versa) and remote clipboard (copy-and-paste)
Oh wait...there is no upgrade pricing.
That sucks.
Using ARD to do tasks like install packages over the network is much easier then in Active Directory or any Linux counterpart. That is to say its more intuitive.
And there's things like Multi-Observe that you don't see in other tools.
Plus combine this with a OS X Server and then you can use things like Remote Set Startup Disk to reimage and entire lab at once. Its a very handy tool, although its a very niche market. Its mostly used by school administrators and admins in graphics design houses and other similar places with large mac networks, and it does make Apple a decent bit of money.
You must be daft. I am sorry for you. One of the hyperlinks in the F'ing summary is http://www.apple.com/remotedesktop/. From the Apple page you have to be a complete dolt to not see the navigation bar on the top. If you click "New Features" you will find:
Remote Spotlight search
Leveraging the revolutionary Spotlight technology in Mac OS X Tiger, the new Remote Spotlight capability in Apple Remote Desktop 3 can perform lightning fast searches on remote client systems running Mac OS X v10.4 or later. Summary results for each client are updated instantly as results are returned. View details on results, or refine searches even further using additional qualifiers. Results can be viewed on remote client systems, copied back to your administrator system, or deleted.
Remote Desktop widget
If you just want a quick look at one screen and are running Apple Remote Desktop 3 on Mac OS X v10.4 Tiger, launch the Remote Desktop widget from Dashboard. The widget is fully-integrated with the administrative application and will allow you to select a specific system from the list of computers under your control.
Of course, screen sharing works both ways. If you want to demonstrate something to one user or an entire group, you can do so by sharing your own screen. Show them exactly how to accomplish a task by walking through the steps yourself.
Curtain Mode
What if you're doing some fine-tuning but would prefer to keep the work hidden from the outside world? Turn on Curtain Mode and the local user's view of the desktop is hidden. You can still view and have full control of the remote system's desktop, but no one else will be able to see what's happening. This feature is perfect for those managing systems that have public displays, such as in museums or kiosks.
For your final one this is from the the first freaking page linked to, good job reading:
User History reports
Do you know who's been using your network? Apple Remote Desktop does, and can track it for you with new User History reports. These reports give you detailed information on who is using a computer, when they logged in and out, and how they accessed the computer.
So hopefully next time you will look at TFA and actually navigate it if it resides on multiple pages (unless you want summaries to be filled to the brim with redundant hyperlinks).
Computers allow humans to make mistakes at the fastest speeds known, with the possible exception of tequila and handguns
For those who are Apple consultants (like me), Specialists, or other folks with ASW (Apple Sales Web) access, it's already been posted there as a .dmg file with a pair of serial numbers that expire at year-end. One caution, though - I installed the update over a copy of 2.2 that I'd done the Rosetta hack on to make it run on my MacBook Pro - after I installed the new version it would not recognize my existing version's application password. I had to re-enter the ID and passwords for all the various Macs I manage - fortunately I had almost all of them written down!
.plist doesn't work). I only have 40-odd machines to keep track of, but this could be an issue for folks with more who already put the older version on an Intel Mac.
Interestingly, installing the same update on my older PowerBook didn't cause any problems, and the whole list imported properly. Not a super big deal overall, except ARD gives you no way to save the usernames and passwords for transfer (moving the
That said, it is definitely an improvement on the older version. And, unlike most older ARD revs, it manages older client versions just fine. You give up the new encryption feature when you do so (no biggie if you connect via a VPN anyway), and I don't know what else yet, but it's reasonably slick thus far.
For those of you wondering "why does Apple charge for this when Windows gives you Remote Desktop for free?", ARD is not really analogous to Windows' Remote Desktop. To get what Windows gives you, just use any VNC viewer with the built-in VNC client on the Mac. ARD is intended for network administrators, and the remote control features are almost a bonus. Package management, reporting, and all that sort of fun stuff is what you get with ARD.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
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"This is Zombo Com, and welcome to you who have come to Zombo Com" - www.zombo.com
ARD was the a rebranding of Apple Network Assistant (ANA) with OS X compatibility. Early versions of ARD were ANA compatible. ANA has been around since at least '95, I'm not sure of the original release date, I only recall the first time seeing it in '95. The 2.0.1 update came out in '96, so the original version was out well earlier than that for certain.
Hyperbole is the worst thing ever.
For all of you who are shrieking about how outrageously overpriced ARD seems to be, compared to the "free" Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection or VNC, a few important points that nobody else has managed to mention:
VNC only does ONE thing: it allows remote control of machines graphically (screen sharing). In order to do any of the things one might wish to do to a remote machine, you have to SEE its desktop and perform those tasks as if you were actually sitting at the other computer. There is no way to perform tasks simultaneously on multiple remote computers, or to simply send instructions to the remote computer, except by controlling it and manually performing them using mouse/keyboard just as you would if you were sitting there. The VNC protocol is essentially bitmapped and everything being done - every frame of every screenful of data - has to be transmitted continuously, and all you get is a mirror image of the remote computer's screen.
RDC is functionally similar to VNC, with the following additions:
(1) In addition to screen sharing, you can also optionally map your printers and disks so that they appear on the remote computer while you're controlling it, so you could, for instance, print a work document and send it to your printer wherever you happen to be at, or put a software installation CD in your drive wherever you happen to be at, and then install that software onto the remote computer because it would also appear in its My Computer as an available drive. Likewise, you can map sounds on the remote computer to yours so that you can hear them.
(2) The RDC protocol is (for lack of a better term) vector-based, meaning that instead of transmitting the remote computer's screen image pixel-by-pixel, this is all performed using the RDC display language. To use an anology, if VNC is a bitmapped inkjet printer, RDC is a postscript printer. This makes the RDC protocol much faster, and remote control is significantly snappier and more responsive as a result. This also means that the desktop you are controlling does not need to be appear identically on both machines; consequently, if the remote computer has a giant widescreen monitor and you're connecting to it on a laptop with a much smaller screen, you don't have to choose between everything being scaled down in size to fit or having to scroll around in order to view the total desktop area; the placement of the taskbar and desktop icons will be adjusted to fit your screen's size.
Comparing RDC and VNC, they mostly have the same features and work the same way: whatever you need to accomplish on the remote computer has to be done by screen sharing and performing the tasks as if you were sitting at the other machine.
Apple Remote Desktop is a VASTLY different product.
First of all, yes, ARD does have a screen sharing capability, just like VNC and RDC, and apparently uses a VNC server as the underlying mechanism. The ARD client component has been a standard part of Mac OS X since Panther (10.3) and can be installed on any other machines free of charge. So any Mac can BE controlled remotely either right out of the box or by installing the client which doesn't have a cost. Any Mac can CONTROL another one with any VNC client, without purchasing any copies of the full ARD product for either machine. Of course, if you do have the full ARD product, it allows you to remotely control any other computer that either has the ARD client OR is running the VNC server, including *nix and Windows machines.
However, beyond screen sharing, ARD does a ton of other things that neither RDC or VNC do at all, period, including:
(1) A huge number of tasks can be performed on a remote computer simply by transmitting commands to that computer -- NOT by viewing its screen and then manually performing the task. This includes everything from shutting a machine down to installing software packages and executing UNIX commands and shell scripts. NONE of these tasks require you to actually view the remote computer's sc