Turning off my system password definitely isn’t going to fly with our IT department. This does, however, preclude me from using this particular solution for the reverse procedure of connecting to my work iMac from home. Which sounds like a huge security risk not worth taking for the benefit it provides but, frankly, if an untrustworthy person is sitting at my desk in my home office, I have bigger problems than whether or not there’s a password on my iMac. So I resorted to turning off “Require Password” in System Preferences on my home iMac. The tool, as it exists here, doesn’t work when the computer is locked. There is one big limitation to this tool. Which looks like this: tell application "System Events" to tell process "SSInvitationAgent"Ĭlick menu item 2 of menu 1 of menu bar item 1 of menu bar 1 , I discovered I could activate the menu and select “Allow Dan to control my screen” with some basic AppleScript. After a bit of googling, some poking around in Activity Monitor, and a brief consultation with Initially, I tried to click the menu with Keyboard Maestro’s “Click at Found Image” action, but the menu bar icon flashes when connected and it failed more often than it succeeded. Within a few seconds, wherever I may be, and invitation to share the screen of my home iMac appears on my desktop and I can click “Connect”. Next, the macro opens the “Buddies” menu and selects “Invite to Share My Screen”. In addition to making the Screen Sharing tools accessible, I will get an iMessage (everywhere) letting me know that the Screen Sharing Invitation is imminent and it’s coming from the computer I expected. The macro types out the words “Incoming Connection from Dan’s iMac” and hits So I took this as an opportunity to add a bit of transparency to the process. The Screen Sharing menu items aren’t accessible until you actually Now, it turns out, it’s not enough to just create a new message with a recipient selected. Which would be very bad.īy opening the KM will open Messages.app and create a new iMessage to my Apple ID. By hard-coding my Apple ID into the macro, there’s no way I can accidentally send the invitation to someone else. We start by using the macOS URL scheme for Messages.app to send a message to my Apple ID. While I’m currently only going to use the tool to remote into my home iMac from work, leaving the rest of the Shortcut intact will allow me to more easilyĪdd the ability to remote into other computers later. So, theĪpplications/Batch/openonmac/Dictionary Value-ScreenShare-Current Date.txt The only thing I needed to change in the Shortcut and Hazel rule was to swap “URL” for “ScreenShare” in the filename. I duplicated the iOS Shortcut I’d use to trigger the whole thing, and the Hazel rule watching for the Shortcut’s input. The easiest way to get things up and running was to duplicate a few of the things I’d created for my My home iMac and offer to share its screen. So, I set about making a tool that I could activate remotely, that would call me It’s the “Invite to Share My Screen” option. Luckily, there’s another menu item in iMessage, just above the “Ask to Share Screen” item. Realized what an awful idea that would be. Given my propensity for making very bad, very unsafe automations, you may be imagining that I just created a Keyboard Maestro macro that would watch for the “Incoming Screen Sharing Request” notification and click “Accept”. I don’t need to open ports on my router or run a private VPN, I just open iMessage, select the person I want to Screen Share with, and click “Ask to Share Screen”. They’re simple, easy to use, and (miraculously) they just work. The Screen Sharing tools built into iMessage are great. But after about a half-dozen requests, I knew I needed a better solution. Which, according to my research, is an application that does…something.įashion, the solution that had the most success was texting my wife at home and asking her to click “Accept” on the iMessage Screen Sharing request that I was sending from my work computer. It didn’t like my company’s port mapping. I needed to control it via some form of screen sharing. I quickly found I needed more than just “access to the data” on that computer. Go figureįor the past few weeks, I’ve been looking around for ways to “get to” my home iMac from my iMac at work. There are, it seems, some workflow issues that can’t solved by just putting things in Dropbox. But trying to manage Macs that are in different physical locations, on different networks, has really put some of my workflows to the test. I’ve always found it fairly easy to manage my multiple Macs with tools like Dropbox, the Mac App Store, and iCloud.
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