After Mac OS X 10.5.5 – cannot reenable additional Screen Sharing (ARD) functions hack
[EDIT: Solution Found to enable screen sharing full screen, here ]
I’d reported that a hack existed to enable Apple Remote Desktop (ARD) alike functionality in the humble built in Screen Sharing client in this post. Unfortuantely, this hack no longer works to enable the ARD like client functions in Leopard 10.5.5, which means:
- No more black and white or 256 colour (greyscale) quality for low bandwidth connections.
- No more clipboard copying.
- No more curtains for the remote screen.
- And: NO MORE FULL SCREEN VNC!
Oh! Unless, that is, you splash out $299 for a TEN LICENCE ADMINISTRATOR’S PACK!
Jeezus H Kriste and his twelve frollicking followers! Leopard must now have the world’s only VNC client that costs $299 to enable full screen.
Kind of reminds me of when Apple used to charge $29 to enable the amzingly awesome
- Quicktime “Pro” function: playback video full screen…
Except that this costs more than 10 times the price!
As much as I still like Mac OS X, things like this are REALLY starting to get my goat.
Sorry, but I’m going to use large numbers of capital letters for a purpose other than acronyms. If you find them offensive, please stop reading, you have been warned.
APPLE: FULL SCREEN VNC IS *NOT* A PRO FEATURE FOR FROLICK’S SAKE!
It’s a feature required and wanted by practically anyone who uses an EFFING laptop to access their glorious BUT REMOTE computer at home with its Full High Definition screen. Or those need to access one Mac from another AT FULL SCREEN QUALITY WITHOUT GOLLYGOSHDARNITSTINKINGMUTHARUBBING SCALING!!!
IS IT SO FRICKIN’ MUCH TO ASK FOR BOUNCING BARNACLE’S SAKE?
Why is it on the PC I can have any resolution I choose, but with the Mac I’m stuck with a crappy frame grab of the whole fragging screen at full spiggotting resolution! For fume’s sake… (Can you tell I’m trying my best not to swear!)
Oh Blow it! I’m installing ARD… available for download from your nearest and dearest search engine.
Leave a comment
Recent Comments
 | John Butler on iMac 27″ screen displays… |
| Fallon Borden on Installing Japanese Sony Sonic… | |
 | Eric Luo on Libretto 50M makes a come… |
 | Rufy saeyuki on Seven Films later… |
 | tyzoone on Intel iMac 27″ developin… |
The Nanchatte Technojunkie 
You can still use the old, hackable Screen Sharing.app. *Thank you Time Machine* =D
Download the old Screen Sharing.app and copy it into your ‘/System/Library/Core Services/’ folder. Apply the hack again.
Software Update will keep bugging you to upgrade, but just ignore it.
or you can downgrade to the old version of screen sharing…
Had to follow NSLog();’s link to realise the comment wasn’t directed at me 😉
NSLog();
Well put.
Sure the functions were “Unofficial” but there’s a generally unspoken rule that you don’t take away something you’ve given freely before and ask $299 for it.
For such a “cool” company, Apple sure as hell could teach Microsoft a lesson or two in “getting your customers to bend over and even provide their own vaseline.”
Me, I went for ARD.
“Sure the functions were “Unofficial” but there’s a generally unspoken rule that you don’t take away something you’ve given freely before and ask $299 for it.” excuse me?
i don’t mean to be crude, but where the hell did you get that idea?
those features weren’t even “given away”. they were undocumented and unreleased, and there was no reason not to remove them to save an extra few k of disk space, or whatever other reason.
there are plenty of other things to get upset about, like how well Apple handled patching the BIND stuff, but frankly, this isn’t one of them.
Like I said, anonymous coward, it’s a largely unspoken rule 😉
What I should have said, to make myself clearer is “don’t take things away that people have got used to without expecting them to be annoyed about it. EVEN IF they were undocumented/unofficial/hidden/accidental/serendipitous”.
Documented or not, people get used to something if they use it for long enough. If it survives several updates, it becomes a “feature” regardless of whether or not it’s official.
And when people get used to something, they can sometime become dependent to a greater or lesser extent on it.
Stretching the analogy to breaking point… Think of it as a common law marriage rather than official matrimony. You’d still be sad if you lost your partner of some years, regardless whether or not it was an official marriage.
As for details? You wanna get down and dirty, then BIND is now fixed so not much point writing about it and in any case is a relatively minor problem compared to some of the hairier exploits out there… Such as root privilege escalation without password and other nastiness…
Still, we’ve been hideously lucky to date as none have caused documented problems (as of mid September ’08).
But this particular problem post on my blog has generated more than a thousand hits in the last few days, so I think I’m not alone in wanting the buttons back that shouldn’t have ever been there… More fool us.
Hope our luck holds out until Apple pull their fingers out of their arses.
Thanks GettoGreen for the suggestion, worked like charm.
Buying a Time Capsule last month has proven to be worth it’s money.,, 🙂
I found some instructions to restore the FullScreen menu item in Screen Sharing. You must have Xcode installed to make the changes, but it’s worth it. All the custom menu buttons appear when in full screen mode.
http://www.macworld.com/article/135649/2008/09/screen_sharing_buttons.html?lsrc=rss_main
Hi.. I’ve modified the native ScreenSharing app according to the post above… u can download the fullscreen-enabled version in here:
http://rapidshare.com/files/226023664/Screen-Sharing.zip.html