Why no love for multiple/nested remote connections? I really don’t get this one. If you’re using Apple Remote Desktop (or Screen Sharing in Leopard), you can’t remote into a machine that’s running a remote desktop client.
That’s unfortunate, and something Microsoft’ Terminal Services does with no fuss. In fact, it’s specifically designed for it. Connect to a gateway machine (in a DMZ, say), then on to whatever box(es) you need. On the whole, TS is really great, actually; something that’s really pretty damn complicated to get right, that they do excellently. The biggest pisser? ARD costs $400. Maybe they expect administrators to do everything at the command line? Sure, you can, but a slick GUI makes mundane tasks faster and easier. The lack of these tools is, IMO, a huge impediment to OS X making a dent in business/enterprise environments. It’s too bad; I’d love to see something like Microsoft’s System Center Essentials (full disclosure: I worked on it) for Macs.
So. If you’re going to sell a service that’s based on, you know, being good with words online, maybe avoid an obvious redundancy?
Teasing with features that don’t work sucks. In this case, Safari offers to mail a link to the page. Nice, right? Well, no such luck when I actually tried to use it:
Huh. OK. Well, I do use Mail.app; maybe it’s not set as the default mail application or something? Well, nope, that’s not it:
So, really, WTF? How on earth is this complicated? If adding <a href="mailto:what@evs"> to a web page can trigger whatever the default mail client to open and compose a message (and always work; when’s the last time you had that one fail?), then what’s the deal with two applications— both that Apple wrote— not talking to each other. This shouldn’t be a bug. I shouldn’t have to try to figure out what the problem is. Fail!
The drag-to-install is a pretty standard paradigm in OS X, as is using a custom background image to spiffy up one’s disk image folder in Finder. This example from Adium combines instruction with cuteness in a particularly stylish and memorable way. The duck(?) throwing up his wings is adorable-tastic.
Check out the icons Gravatar stole for this page:
Let’s see. The computer is from Vista, the globe is… I dunno where it’s from, but it looks familiar. The webcam is the camera app on the iPhone, and the folder-and-hourglass job is, I think, from an old KDE theme. Way to slap that one together, guys, especially on a page every user sees.
