Thursday Night Rant on keyboard and mouse sharing

Go here if you want to read Chris Breen’s thoughts and the commenter’s reaction to Chris trying to help someone share a keyboard and mouse between two Macs.

Chris tried Synergy. He couldn’t get it to work with Lion. If Chris can’t get Synergy to work with the resources of Macworld behind him, this FOSS project has serious problems.

He next tried Teleport from Abyssoft. I’ve tried it, albeit with 10.4 and 10.6, and it worked well.

Chris mentions a couple of paid solutions. ShareMouse is mentioned, but it costs $25 per machine. I tried it in its trial version and it worked. The costs, though, daunted me.

Finally, you have j5 Wormhole, a hardware and software combination. You plug a special USB cable between two computers, fire up the software, and you can share keyboard, mouse, and clipboard. It’s $40.

The program I used to use between my Wintel 7 box and my MacBook running 10.6, vnc2win, doesn’t work with 10.7. 10.7 has problems regarding VNC.