Regarding Apple Remote Desktop

I got some mail asking why I was giving Apple Remote Desktop a hard time in a previous post, and I suppose I should quantify my comment: while I do just find dealing with ARD loathsome, it's primarily from using Windows, and it's only because I want what ARD can't offer.

If you haven't used it, ARD the software Apple sells to let you control Apple Computers remotely via a GUI. You get client software and an administration utility to access/control them.

It's a little more than that, as it also incorporates management tools; I.E., create a disk image of what you want on your 300 Macs and then push it out to them. If you ask administrators who have to take care of a bunch of Macs, they'll usually say it's invaluable. Then they'll spit, because it kinda sucks compared to what's on the other side.

It's buggy and it's slow. This isn't to say things like VNC and such that you'll use for Linux are speed demons, but by and large, using later versions with updated compression, it feels like an order of magnitude faster than ARD.

I've never had ARD feel remotely fast, and never been under the illusion that I was actually sitting at the other computer. It's not too bad over 100BT, but the idea of using it over the internets (broadband) at this point just wigs me out. Let alone 10BT. Or wireless. We won't even speak about what wireless does to ARD. 802.11b, 802.11.g, whatever, it doesn't care, it chokes them all.

Microsoft pretty much blows it all out of the water with RDC, or Remote Desktop Connection for Windows. It's incredibly fast. You can use it over the internets (broadband, not modem) and it's, well, usable. You can sit on a computer in one room, but be working on the computer in the next room over wireless, and it feels like you're actually sitting at the other computer. It's built-in, and it works really, really well. Hell, Microsoft released a client for the Mac so you can access your Windows client/server and it smokes.

Which isn't to say you don't have access to this stuff already with your Mac; I can login via SSH for the command line, but for GUI I'm out of luck when it comes to what's built-in. There is nothing I can just plug into. I can download and install VNC solutions for this that allow you to control a variety of platforms, and these have improved greatly on the Mac lately... but they're still always slow. One example I've heard is that the widgets and shadows and such of Aqua don't compress well, and that might contribute to it, but I doubt it's the whole story.

If I want to shell out $$$, I can buy Apple Remote Desktop and install the client on any machines (remember, nothing is built-in on OS X) and then install the administrator app on the machine I want to control it with. There are always old mainstays like Timbuktu, but that hasn't made the leap to OS X all that well.

And none of them, none of them, come even close to what you get if you are using Windows. And this isn't because a Windows screenshot compresses so much better than an Aqua one. There's real, solid technology making it happen.

A primary problem of this is Quartz itself, it wasn't really designed with multiple users in mind, let alone streaming it out over a network. IIRC, this was actually something that was given up in the move from Display Postscript to Quartz.

To get a bastardized idea of the differences, think of VNC as taking a snapshot of the 'host' systems screen and passing it out over the network to the 'controller', along with a small stream of data going back and forth giving information such as where the mouse is, and that something has been clicked at coordinates x and y.

The first optimization you can do is compress the screenshot, the second might be to have some logic to figure out what on the screen has actually changed. But you're still sending out a lot of graphical data for just about everything, and the larger your screen the crazier it can get. Even a quarter of a 1600x1200 desktop is a sizable snapshot to send off over and over.

Now imagine something that works much more in the vein of how an internet-based game works: you start using prediction for where the mouse is going, and above all you send as little actual image data as possible. All the things like the widgets, windows, etc. get drawn locally by the controller system which is just being fed a series of commands saying "draw a standard window here, move a standard window there".

I've had Mac users say this graphical remote access is an unnecessary feature, not something people really want, and as such it doesn't matter that OS X doesn't have it. These same people said pretty much the same about 'Active User Switching' which was something else Windows had built-in which Apple eventually adopted. They're the kind of things that allow you to use your computer in different ways, and can help change how you work, and this is only going to get more important as time goes on.

A feature like Active User Switching allows a family with one computer not to have to log out daughter when Mom needs to check for an important email or vice versa. Before that, daughter would have to close down everything, log out, let mom log in and do her thing, etc. It allows developers to easier test software, it allows administrators to make better use of their labs, and a whole host of other things I'm not mentioning.

But more and more, homes have more than one computer, generally from a mix of:

  • The average cost of a computer has fallen so that this is in the realm of fiscal reality for more and more people to indulge the convenience of letting a parent work on Quicken while daughter works on finding malware to download
  • Reliability of the hardware we buy has fallen drastically while dependancy has ballooned. The amount of users who can do without their computer for a few days to a week has shrunk in a big way, and almost everything out there isn't trustworthy, especially notebooks, and yes, this included iBooks and Powerbooks.
  • Different hardware is better suited to different tasks; doing real video work on an iBook is painful, and doing emails and web browsing on the sofa with a G5 in your lap is equally so.

As we become more and more dependent on multiple machines, we're going to care less and less about which actual machine we're using. We're just going to want to do what we want to do. And that's pretty much what I want; if I'm sitting in the next room working on my portable, I want to be able to connect to the other computer and work with it in a reasonable way for whatever I want to do.

I'm not going to list a ton of examples, as these are different for everyone. But if you've ever tried to walk someone through troubleshooting on the phone, I'm sure you can think of a few.

yummy alcohol posted button Posted by drunkenbatman
    November 06, 2004, at 06:19 AM


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