Mac Geekery

I kind of accidentally stumbled across this one and the sheer usefulness of it really set me back.

I’ve been playing with teleport a bit as I again have multiple machines at my desk and no KM switch to go between them. Being an iMac, an external display, and a MacBook Pro, I have three screens to use for a lot of things and teleport is phenomenally useful and suited for this task. I just really wasn’t prepared for the unexpected benefits it can have in this case.

Before I go there, and for those unfamiliar with teleport, let me explain what’s happening with teleport first. teleport is a program (teleportd actually) that waits for the mouse to touch a side of the screen and, when it does, connects to another teleport-enabled Mac and sends all mouse input (including 2-axis scroll-wheel input) and all keyboard input (with the exception of media keys) to that machine instead of the parent. Then you touch the opposite side of the remote Mac’s screen as if you are moving from one monitor back to the main one and the connection drops, putting you back on your home machine. It’s great for having multiple Macs at the same desk as the newer versions include private-key encryption of your input as well as file drags and clipboard sync. It’s just great, and since it’s donation-ware, give something to the guy.

Now, that said, consider that it’s taking all input, including those things Front Row uses. So, I drifted over to the other machine and, feeling entirely comfortable with using my input devices with the machine because it’s so seamless, I called up Front Row (⌘-ESC) and started to look for a video when I realized … I was using the iMac’s keyboard.

So, that’s one way to get remote control of Front Row without the Apple Remote. Now, to make it a little more useful I went into iTunes on the iMac and told it to share my media on the network and ensured the MBP’s iTunes was looking for network shares and went back into Front Row and started watching my video podcasts full-screen in Front Row on my MBP on one computer and went back to work on the iMac. If I needed to change something I just moused to the side of the screen to activate teleport and hit the right keys to get Front Row to do my bidding and then returned to working on the iMac.

Sometimes I just love how this stuff works together.

Front Row Keyboard Reference

This works the other way as well. Start Front Row on the computer whose input devices you are using and then mouse blindly to the side of the screen where the other computer should be and teleport will move the input there, leaving the main computer running Front Row without interruption.