Back to My Mac

As I mentioned in an earlier post, Back to My Mac is a feature offered by Apple through thier .Mac service. Up until today we had very few details but now that OS X Leopard has been officially announced the info I so much desired has come pouring in. Basically, everything I had hoped for made it into the final product.

The first part that I was looking for was the ability to easily get files from or send files to my other Macs from anywhere. With Back to my Mac you can do that easily. Once you’re online all of the Macs you have associated with the .Mac service simply show up in the finder window and you can connect to them and get complete access to their files.

The other part of the service is the ability to control your macs from anywhere. Through the same interface you can click on ‘Share Screen…” and have immediate control of your mac. It looks like it works over VNC so performance isn’t going to be stunning over slow connections but it will be plenty to do whatever needs to be done. When you connect to it you are presented with your Macs screen and you can interact with it just like you would if you were right in front of it, launch programs, reboot, whatever you’d like.

What makes this service interesting is that the end user configuration is essentially zero. Once you setup your computer for .Mac all of this functionality is there out of the box, and setting up .Mac couldn’t be simpler. You launch system preferences and enter a user name and password into the .Mac panel. Takes 2 seconds. If you wanted to do something like this on the PC you would either need to install a third party application or make modifications to your software and hardware firewalls… I’ll take .Mac thank you!

Topslakr

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