A long time ago I discussed an easy way to run Synergy on OS X. This is a good solution if you want to use a single keyboard and mouse to control multiple machines with multiple OSes. However, if all the machines you want to share are Macs there is a better solution, Teleport. Teleport does everything Synergy does and some more besides. To be honest, I’m pretty sure Teleport is just Synergy with some Mac-specific features added in. However, they are good extra features and Teleport had the kind of fantastic user interface Mac users have come to demand. The entire program is contained within a System Preferences preference pane. You just install this pane (by double clicking it) and open up two ports on your firewall and you’re ready to go (you have to do this on all machines that will use Teleport).

The big improvements for me over the Synergy option described in my original post are:

• Simple Drag-and-Drop arrangement of displays
• An actual security model and support for encryption
• The ability to sync clip boards between machines
• The ability to transfer files by dragging them from one machine to another (only works well with small files)
• An overlay is displayed the main display when the mouse and keyboard are ‘teleported’ to another display. This overlay shows the teleporter logo, the name of the computer that the keyboard and mouse have been ‘teleported’ to and an arrow showing where that display is in relation to the master. (This feature alone was enough to convince me to switch.)

Teleport can be easily controlled via a menu bar icon and to really sweeten the deal it’s freeware 🙂

[tags]Teleport, Synergy, OS X[/tags]