We brought you early coverage and the first news of Leopard’s Screen Sharing capabilities back in August but Apple legal made us take it down.

Today, Macworld’s Rob Grifiths shows us how to turn Leopard's built-in Screen Sharing into a full-fledged screen sharing application - with a lot of he features that are sold in Apple Remote Desktop.  It only takes a few lines of cipher in the terminal.

1. Find the screen sharing application and put it in the dock.  It is at /System/Library/CoreServices/Screen Sharing.app

2. Run that in terminal:

defaults write com.apple.ScreenSharing ShowBonjourBrowser_Debug 1

You will now be able to open Screen Sharing and see local computers on your network that can be controlled.  Close it again so you can add some more functionality…

3.  Now, to add a bunch of buttons that are plus found in Apple Remote Desktop, type in that command (it is one line):

 

defaults write com.apple.ScreenSharing ‘NSToolbar Configuration ControlToolbar’ -dict-add ‘TB Item Identifiers’ ‘(Scale,Control,Share,Curtain,Capture,FullScreen,GetClipboard,SendClipboard,Quality)’

Now restart Screen Sharing.  You should see all of the goodies that you additionally see in Apple Remote desktop.  Macworld runs down the list:

 

 

So what do these new buttons do? Here’s a quick rundown on each.

Switch within controlling the remote Mac (the default) and simply observing the other machine.

Switch

amidst allowing the remote Mac’s keyboard and mouse to be used (the default) and locking them out.

This button will lock the other Mac’s screen, displaying an all-black background, a huge lock icon, and the text you enter after clicking that button. Note that there’s a minor bug here; you’ll actually see the name of a variable that Apple left in the text field, too—so whether you type “Using remotely,” the displayed notice will be “Using remotelylockedByString.” that button is off by default, meaning the other Mac’s screen displays what you’re doing.

Click that button to capture the remote Mac’s screen to a local file. You’ll capture the full screen, and the system will ask you to pick a name and save location for the file.

Toggle within windowed (the default) and full screen modes. In full screen mode, the toolbar floats in the top left of the screen. To exit full screen mode, go the “X” button on the toolbar.

Not really a button at all, that is the quality slider. whether you’re finding that screen updates are going slowly, for instance, you can reduce the quality—all the way down to a badly dithered black-and-white representation—to speed things up.

Original post by Chauncey Dupree