supersonic feet

Reading about Thomas Baekdal’s cool new home office setup, one of the comments pointed to a cool app that lets you share your mouse and keyboard with other computers (Windows, Mac and Linux) called Synergy. You basically run a server on the computer that has the mouse and keyboard you want to share, then a client on the other computer(s) and it’s then as simple as moving your mouse off the edge of one screen and onto another.

I’d seen apps doing this just for Macs, but I have a Windows PC and an iMac, so this is great!

No more do I have to use the crappy Mighty Mouse or Mac keyboard (I know it has its fans, but it’s FAR too small for my liking). I was getting ready to order an extra Logitech MX Revolution and MS Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 for use on the Mac so as long as Synergy doesn’t fail me I’ve just saved myself a bunch of money.

Only thing I’ve noticed so far is that it tends to hang briefly every minute or two on the Mac (client), then catches up. Hopefully there’s a bit of config somewhere to help iron this out as that could get annoying.

EDIT: Forgot to mention: it also lets you copy & paste between machines too. Very nifty!

Now that they’re using Intel processors and after a group of hackers managed to get Windows running on an Intel Mac, Apple have announced Boot Camp. Boot Camp is basically a bit of dual-booting software for Intel Macs that allows you to choose between Mac OS X or Windows XP at boot-up.

It’s available now in beta and will come standard with the next major release of OS X (Leopard). I imagine it’ll do its intended job very well too - encouraging people like me who are still iffy on taking the plunge and getting a Mac to feel a bit safer in the knowledge that their new Mac can always fall back to XP when needed.

It’ll be interesting to see how XP compares in terms of performance on Apple hardware, but it has put the idea of getting a Mac Mini back in my mind to check OS X out.

I wonder if we’ll start seeing OS X able to run on non-Apple PCs now that the two operating systems can clearly be handled on the same hardware.