Inspirational Technology

Playing with Synergy

I've been experimenting with different ways of using the Tablet PC together with the Mac and in my efforts I decided to see if I could figure out a way to share the keyboard and mouse between them. I'm not aware of any software that can do this directly between a Mac and a Windows XP machine. I'm not talking about a KVM switch type of thing, I have one of those too and I don't like it. I want to share via software over the network so that mouse movements on the Mac are translated into mouse movements on the Tablet and you can do things like share the clipboard across as well.

For the most part I use the Remote Desktop client (RDC) and it works pretty well, but I don't like the fact it locks the Tablet display. I'd like to be able to still use the Tablet PC screen while also using the Mac's keyboard with it. I'd rather have a more RDC like integration, but more for just sharing the keyboard and mouse rather than doing remote display.

Right now I'm playing with Synergy. Synergy allows you to share a mouse and keyboard between multiple machines running Linux or Windows. It basically does exactly what I want, except it doesn't appear to support the Mac yet. What I've been experimenting with is using another windows PC to run the Synergy software and then using it to control the Tablet PC. So basically what I have is an RDC connection to my Dell laptop running Windows XP and then use it to control the tablet. It almost works too. The major problem is that the mouse doesn't track right, it jumps all over the place. The keyboard does work though. You can also copy from the Mac and then paste on the tablet, but going the other direction doesn't seem to quite work. The clipboard makes it to the Dell Windows PC, but not through the RDC connection to the Mac.

I also tried ShareKMC and it has the same mouse problem.

Overall it's been an interesting experiment, hopefully some day Synergy will add support for Mac OS X. When it does, it should be an excellent solution for integrating multiple machines together.