Teleport from Abyssoft is an excellent utility that allows Mac users with more than one machine running OS X Panther and Tiger to simply and easily control both machines from one keyboard and mouse.

For example suppose you have a desktop iMac and a MacBook and want to do a bit of work on both but don’t want to keep changing between your nice desktop keyboard and mouse and the MacBook’s keyboard and trackpad. Follow the simple steps below and you will be good to go.

1. Setup the two machines side by side on the desk
2. Download Teleport on both machines, unzip the file and double click teleport.prefPane to install Teleport Preferences in Preference Panel.
3. Open System Preferences and in the Teleport Preference Panel tick “Activate teleport” on both machines.
4. On the laptop ( or Mac that you want to control from the Master keyboard and mouse ) tick the “Share this Mac” option also.
5. On the desktop ( or Master machine ) you will see the laptop appear in the Layout pane, simply drag it down so it is next to your desktop screen ( on the right or left side depending on where you have physically placed the laptop on your desk )




6. You are done. When you now move the cursor on the desktop Mac off the edge of the screen towards the laptop it will instantly appear on the laptop.

The latest version of Teleport available today ( 16th Sept 2006 ) adds a couple of really killer features too, encryption and drag and drop between machines. The first is obvious enough but the second is perhaps not..
Normally if you have a file on one machine and want a copy on another machine on the same network the way to acheive this is to switch on file sharing on one machine, connect to the shared machine and copy the file directly into the required location. With Teleport this is not necessary, you simply click the file on one machine and drag it across onto the screen on the other machine and drop it and the file is instantly copied, it couldnt be any simpler than that.

Drag and Drop is not enabled by default. To enable it go to the Teleport preference panel, select the Options tab and tick the option to enable “Drag & Drop files between Macs”. You can also enable an option to synchronise the pasteboard to enable information to by cut and pasted between documents on the two machines.

It is also worth mentioning that Teleport will work across more than two machines, so if you have many Mac’s you could have them all controlled by the same keyboard and mouse.

This is a highly recommended utility, if you have more than one Mac you probably should have this.

[tags]mac, osx, utilities, apple, kvm[/tags]