Launch Mac VNC Screen Sharing client from Safari or Finder
Did you know that you can quickly launch Mac OS X’s built in VNC program called Screen Sharing, just by typing an address into the URL bar of Safari?
In Safari, hit Command+L to go to the URL bar and type: vnc://
Hit Return and Screen Sharing will launch immediately. If you specified an IP address it will open to that host immediately, otherwise a window will pop up asking you for the VNC Host address.
Where is the Mac VNC client located anyway?
You may have noticed that if you try to do a Spotlight search for Screen Sharing it won’t show up, this is because it’s located within the System directory CoreServices:
/System/Library/CoreServices/Screen Sharing.app/
Accessing Screen Sharing can be done either through Safari as mentioned above, or from the Finder by hitting Command+K and typing vnc://
So, can I access it from a non-mac and use a cheap netbook as a remote workstation ?
Not on OS X 10.4 or 5 (or at least I can’t!), perhaps 10.6 is different, but you can install VineServer on your Mac, fire it up remotely via ssh (as root) and hit it from Linux, Solaris or Windows (I have used it from those OSes, others will work I suspect) and it will work. I’ve used it for managing XServes fairly successfully.