Following on from last week’s expiry of Beta 2 of their Remote Desktop Connection software for the Mac MS have released Beta 3 this week. I’ve just given it a quick test-run and the bottom line is that I’ll be sticking with CoRD rather than changing back to MS Remote Desktop Connection. All in all this beta is a bit of a mixed bag.

First, the good stuff:

• The annoying nag screen telling you to update is gone, yay! 🙂
• When you enter your login details they are actually correctly passed on to the target machine so auto logging in now works for me where as it always failed with Beta 2.
• There is now a simple option to start a new session: File -> New Connection. This has been missing for so long that I’m happy to see it. Unfortunately it’s badly implemented, it opens an entire separate instance instead of opening a second window within the one instance. Far from ideal but a step in the right direction none-the-less.
• KeyChain integration seems to actually work properly now.

As well as the short-comings in the way multiple simultaneous sessions are handled there are also another few down sides:

• The application still crashes each and every time I try to disconnect from a server.
• Rather than use Apple’s crash reporter MS have replaced it with their own which send the info straight to Redmond (good), but unlike the Apple one it does NOT show you what it is sending before it sends it. So God only knows what all is being phoned home to Redmond!

[tags]RDP, Remote Desktop Connection, Microsoft, Windows, Mac, OS X, CoRD[/tags]