I'm testing the single user version of this (iRAPP):
http://www.coderebel.com/I like it. It essentially lets your Mac behave like a Windows machine that allows for remote login. What I am looking for is an RDP client that will allow me to log into my Mac like we do Windows virtual machines in our cloud.
Good:It did it! I was surprised to see my Mac come right up with my iTap RDP client on the iPad perfectly. The RDP client features for scrolling, selecting, right clicking etc worked just as they do in a Windows environment. It's interesting because it "blue screens" (not BSOD, but the Mac's "curtain" for when it's resizing the screen) then opens back up in the resolution that I've selected in the client ... in this case, 1024x768. This is both good and bad, as you shall see. The good: my Mac now has a 1024x768 screen rather than 6 monitors of huge resolution that I must scroll through trying to get to what I want.
Be Careful:In my multi-monitor Mac environment, there are challenges if (when I was last at my desk) I opened a Finder window and closed it while on any monitor other than my primary one - because when you open it back up, it comes up on THAT monitor rather than the main one, so it doesn't show in the client. Also, logging into my normal account on the iPad skooshed my apps up (as described above) because the resolution and screen layout is so very different. So what I did was to create another account on my Mac that has unfettered access to my main accounts files. So now when I RDP in, my normal account is frozen and the other account is what comes up. I set it to my same email, MobileMe etc so that it is, for all intents and purposes, the same machine but keeps all my layout for the normal account as is. When I log out of the iPad it doesn't log out of that account on the Mac - it changes resolution back to my normal screen size, but it stays in my remote login. So I have to logoff and then log back into my normal account, which was frozen and comes back up exactly as I left it.
Bad:The keyboard send completely failed. When I created a folder on the iPad and then called up the keyboard the first key I hit caused a reset of the connection. This persisted regardless of application - any keyboard data sent up to my machine caused a connection reset. So that really makes MOST of what I'd need to do unusable until they fix it, or identify what it is and I get a work around. I've emailed tech support and will comment back as it goes forward.
Pretty horrible:It costs $289. It is a reasonable thing for me (provided they get the keyboard fixed) to have access to my machine like that anywhere I go, but that's pretty pricey for most, for this functionality. It is arguable that I could create another account, manually change the resolutions for THAT account and use VNC instead... but that would be too much of a hassle - having to remember to log out and back in everytime I walk from my desk. So we'll have to see how responsive they are and how well this works over time. I am in the middle of a 2 week free trial, so I'll know more soon.
Interesting, but unknown yet:They have another product which (I THINK) provides XenApp like functionality from a Mac server. This is interesting. If, side by side in our cloud, we could allow Mac users to be running PC apps and PC users access to Mac apps, that'd be pretty stellar. I don't know yet, gonna contact them this week and get the outside parameters of their offering. It'd be pretty cool to have an OSX cloud as well as a Windows cloud and agnostic app execution.
