By amazing coincidence, Microsoft released RDC beta 2 today with “multiple sessions redesigned and improved“. And they are so sooo close, but they still don’t quite have it right.
There is a File… New… option to open… a new copy of RDC! That’s better but it’s not right. I can’t think of any other app (at least the ones I use) that start another instance of the application to make another connection or open another file. Those apps simply open a new window as part of the already-running application. My Dock is crowded enough without half a dozen identical icons to the right side.
Why can’t Microsoft figure this out? I don’t understand the logic behind their approach, and as much as I hear from the Mac BU how much they love the Mac just like we do, I can’t fathom why they have this so wrong, because it’s obvious they don’t understand some basic things. In the upcoming Office 2008, will opening multiple Word documents or Excel spreadsheets cause a second instance of the respective application to open? I sure hope not. Will composing an e-mail in Entourage cause a second copy of Entourage to be launched? I doubt it. So why does RDC behave this way? Does their RDC development team actually use Mac OS X?
It would also behoove them to create a sidebar, like CoRD has, (It actually has a drawer, I know.) where saved connections can be selected quickly, you can see at a glance what connections are active, and you can manage settings for each individual connection. This business with having to save individual files for each RDC connection is dumb. They need to create a folder, ~/Library/Application Support/Mirosoft RDC, and write a plist file containing the settings for the connections to be shown in the side bar. I’m not a Mac developer, and even I understand how this is supposed to work.
There are some other improvements in this beta, but because I so often need multiple connections open, those improvements mean little to me because the basics of this app are so messed up.
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October 30th, 2007 at 10:30 pm
Some problems with CoRD for me:
1) I can’t adjust keymappings. I don’t want, do.not.want any key to be the windows key. First thing I kill in Remote Desktop Client.
2) Drag and drop of files on the remote client doesn’t work for me. other drag operations do, not that one.
3) no control over drive access in the UI
4) no printing. (I haven’t had a chance to see if RDC finally got this to work right, so it may still hold true for that.)
5) I can’t tell CoRD to start a given program automatically on login
6) No options for security in the UI.
7) No options to put my saved .rdp files where *I* want them to go.
So CoRD gives me one thing I don’t have with Remote Desktop Client, namely the drawer thing, which is pretty sweet, but I don’t mind the multiple instance thing. However it doesn’t give me 6-7 other things I DO care about, and it’s not exactly able to win on price.
October 30th, 2007 at 10:37 pm
So the solution to our RDC conundrum is for Microsoft to implement some basic UI principles in their client, which is what I’m asking for.
October 31st, 2007 at 12:22 am
There are advantages to both. CoRD’s implementation, while tidier requires more screen space for the UI widgets that can’t be used for displaying the Windows work area. I can completely hide the toolbar, but then some of CoRD’s UI advantages are lost.
One advantage to Remote Desktop Client’s UI is that I can more easily open multiple VMs at once, and it is far easier to view multiple connections simultaneously in Remote Desktop Client than in CoRD. That’s something I do quite regularly, and with multiple monitors, I can have a LOT of connections open at once.
While I like the option of a “tabbed chat” ui, being forced into it is not necessarily *better* than Remote Desktop Client’s forcing you into a separate window/connection mode is, it’s just different.
October 31st, 2007 at 10:24 am
You can completely hide the toolbar and the drawer on the side, leaving only the pixels used for the window title bar and the Windows screen itself. Can’t get any more space-efficient than that. And you can bring the toolbar back with a click of the chicklet, or the drawer back with the press of a key. There’s a key combination to scroll through open sessions and to do each thing in the toolbar, so closing those things doesn’t cripple the functionality of the app. Mac users are adept at using keyboard shortcuts for many things in many apps. CoRD is no different.
I personally think it’s much easier to open multiple connections at once by selecting from a list in the already-opened app. I think it’s also easier to see what you’re already connected to that way also. Microsoft RDC puts an icon for each connection in the Dock, each one labelled “Remote Desktop Connection”, with the name of the machine or IP address as part of the icon. As you add more connections, and as you have more icons in your Dock, those identical RDC icons to the right side get smaller and harder to read to tell what’s what. That’s bad UI design, if you ask me, and I’d much prefer a list in a sidebar or drawer where connections are more clearly identified.
October 31st, 2007 at 9:06 pm
The dock icon labels are a bug, no doubt. However, the problem with CoRD is that if you need to have separate windows, something I need on a regular basis, there’s no way to do that. That’s a deal-breaker for me. I’m not going to sit there when configuring WebSphere, and click back and forth between tabs over and over.
I’m also not happy that CoRD doesn’t let me remap my mac keys to windows keys the way Remote Desktop Client does. I don’t WANT a Windows key in Remote Desktop Client, but with CoRD, I have to have one. That’s beyond annoying, since I use the cmd key for the right click modify key when I’m not using an external mouse. Remote Desktop Client lets me do that, CoRD doesn’t. I’ve also found CoRD to have generally worse performance than Remote Desktop Client in terms of screen redraws.
Right now, CoRD has *one* better feature than Remote Desktop Client, and quite a few that are worse.
November 1st, 2007 at 6:08 pm
I wouldn’t say the Dock icon is a bug, I would say it’s just plain bad design.
We’re drifting away from the point of the article. I understand that CoRD may not have some features that are important to you. The point I made in the original article, however, is that Microsoft’s way of establishing new connections to machines by opening another instance of the app and saving settings for each connection in individual files is a bad way to do things. Multiple RDC connections should open as threads under the same parent app to be consistent with the OS and to make open sessions easier to identify, at minimum. Connections should be managed either through something like a bookmark menu or tabs or a Finder-like sidebar, but not by individual files saved with each remote machine’s settings. I use CoRD to demonstrate what I think is a superior interface for multiple connections, not a superior feature set.
November 4th, 2007 at 7:50 pm
The thing is, that’s only partially right. If multiple connections are individual threads, then a single app crash or lockup takes them all down. That’s hardly more reliable. The way RDC does things may not be the way you like, but that’s not the same as bad. As well, if once RDC connection locks up, it’s easy to quit *just that session*, because it’s a separate process. Apps crash, it’s a way of life, but with Cord, one connection can take n connections with it, whereas with RDP, that can’t happen.
As well, you’re missing the fact that CoRD in fact, uses separate files to save each machine’s settings. Look in ~/Library/Application Support/CoRD/Servers/ and you see an RDP file for each server. On my machine, they’re all labled “New Server(n).rdp” where (n) is an integer. So while they look okay in the CoRD display, if you want to save those files to a server so you can have some quick defaults, you have to open each file in a text editor to tell what server it’s set for.
CoRD’s UI is better if you don’t need to have multiple windows open and accessible at the same time. If you do, it is a remarkable pain in the ass.
November 8th, 2007 at 8:45 pm
Maybe I’m misusing some terminology, but individual ARD sessions are all started under the currently running ARD app (threads?) and not separate instances of the ARD app altogether. Microsoft certainly doesn’t seem worried about reliability when it comes to applications like Word and Excel, where they open multiple documents as children of the Word or Excel app. Problems with documents in any application can cause data loss, yet I see almost nobody using multiple running copies of the app to avoid such a circumstance.
I’m not missing that at all. I don’t think CoRD saves those connections correctly either. In this post, I suggested that MS use CoRD as a model and improve it. A case can be made for both separate, descriptively named RDC files and a plist, but my primary focus is interface, since I will deal with that much more than implementation.
This may be a philosophical difference we can’t resolve. I much prefer a single window and tabs or a sidebar for multiple documents (Smultron comes to mind) versus multiple app instances. I don’t find that method of navigation to be a pain in the ass at all.
Here’s a solution… Tabs or a sidebar list where you can tear off individual connections into their own window. Safari does that quite well already.