ScreenSharingMenulet connect to local, Back to My Mac and custom hosts via Screen Sharing from the menu bar

Starting with version 2.5 ScreenSharingMenulet is available only on the Mac App Store

Minimum Requirements:



• Intel Mac

• Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard or later

Features:



• Real-time search for available local and Back to My Mac hosts.

• Option to create custom non-local hosts with host, displayed name and port.

• Option to display custom hosts inline or in a submenu.

• Optional display of Back to My Mac hosts and local IP addresses.

• Optional disable the Bonjour browser.

• AppleScript support.

• Export/Import of custom hosts.

• Retina display support.

• Wake On Lan (WoL) for custom hosts.

• German, Dutch, French and Swedish localization.



How to use:

• Just select one of the displayed hosts to connect via Screen Sharing.

• Create custom hosts in the pane "My Computers" of the preference panel and choose them from a submenu (or optional from the main menu).

• Enable WoL in the pane "My Computers". A valid hardware address (primary Ethernet MAC-Address, format 11:22:33:44:55:66) must be specified.

• You can add ScreenSharingMenulet to the login items in the preference panel.



Hint:



If you want to connect temporarily to a shared host, create a new entry in the preference panel leaving the host field blank.

In this case the "Connect to Shared Computer" dialog box of Screen Sharing.app will open.



Notification Center:



By default the bonjour hosts are not shown in Notification Center when ScreenSharingMenulet is launching or the bonjour browser is restarting.

If you want to be notified about all bonjour host changes, type in Terminal.app

defaults write com.klieme.ScreenSharingMenulet SkipBonjourNotificationOnRestart -bool NO



Wake On Lan:

As sleeping hosts don't appear in the local hosts section, WoL is available only for custom hosts.

Automatically detected hosts in the local hosts section can be added to the custom hosts by selecting the menu item while pressing the option-key.

After sending the WoL packet the connection can take some time, ScreenSharingMenulet waits for the notification when the target host is awake.



Note: On pre Snow Leopard systems WoL works only on wired computers.

See the article About Wake on Demand to enable Wake on Demand in Snow Leopard.

AppleScript example:

tell application "ScreenSharingMenulet"

set newService to make new custom service at end of custom services with properties {host:"111.222.333.444", name:"MyHost", port:5900}

connect to newService

end tell

Known Problems:

The connection to Back to My Mac hosts is not reliable. It depends on router hardware and firewall settings.

Even if the password is correct an error message could occur. It has been tested with Apple Time Capsule and Apple Airport Express base stations.



Version Compatibility:

• ScreenSharingMenulet 1.7.1 and higher is compatible to Mac OS 10.6 Snow Leopard.

• ScreenSharingMenulet 2.2 and higher is compatible to Mac OS 10.7 Lion and Mac OS 10.8 Mountain Lion.

