Monday, February 19, 2007

Add a Caching Clipboard to OS X

If your regular routine involves a lot of cutting and pasting of text,
try the free open-source utility Jumpcut. In the months I've been using it, it's changed my working habits significantly. Particularly if I'm writing email or posting to this blog and including a number of links, I'll just copy all the links I find interesting as I go, then paste them all in one later session.

Friday, February 09, 2007

Software-based Keyboard/Mouse Sharing

If you operate multiple computers concurrently on your desktop, and frequently switch between them, here is a free software-only solution to sharing a single keyboard and mouse between them. And it's really slick.

Synergy is cross-platform (Win 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP, Mac OS X, Unix) software solution for sharing a single keyboard and mouse between multiple computers. Unlike traditional hardware KVMs (keyboard/video/mouse switches), this scenario requires that you have a monitor dedicated to each computer, and that the computers are networked together.

The cool part is how Synergy is used: the user simply moves the cursor from monitor to monitor, and the keyboard works for whichever monitor the cursor is currently located. Synergy also automatically merges the clipboards of the systems (text-only for OS X), so users can cut-and-paste between computers transparently. Synergy also synchronizes the screen savers (except OS X) of the connected computers.