Aaron Adams’s Lame-ass Blog

I found some old Windows 95 CDs in the attic, so I created a virtual machine to remind myself how far we’ve come. I was very amused to see this in the setup:

“Quick View - Enables you to preview a document without opening it.”

Those of us who use Leopard recognize something similar.

“Using Quick Look in Leopard, you can view the contents of a file without even opening it.”

I don’t remember using Quick View in Windows 95, but I do find Quick Look in Leopard to be very useful. What’s most interesting to me is that, even with all of the advancements over the past dozen years or so, many of the core ideas behind computing are the same.

Here’s what I’d like someone who knows how to use Photoshop to do for me:

Start with a Finder window. In the the side bar at the left, make a heading for CONNECTED and SERVERS, with disclosure triangles. Put a few machines under each heading.

In the content area of the window, where files and folders are shown, put a screen capture of a Windows desktop.

In the title bar and tool bar up top, add a button set like the CoRD picture two posts down.

Ta da! There’s the new Microsoft RDC interface. Not hard.

Your reward for creating this graphic will be my thanks, and I’ll post it on the page. Bonus points for a properties window (invoked by command-i, of course) showing the settings for each connection in the side bar.

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.

This is CoRD.

It is free. The interface is better than your RDC client by leaps and bounds. How is it that a freeware developer understands the basics of how a remote control app should work, and the coders at Microsoft do not?

CoRD is a Mac OS X remote desktop client for Microsoft Windows servers using the rdp protocol. It is easy to use, fast, and free for anyone to use or modify.

You even have the CoRD code to start from. Improve it. There’s no excuse for the stupid RDC client you have now.

Microsoft,

Remote Desktop Connection 2.0 beta sucks. Your system for opening multiple connections is convoluted, at best. I should be able to press command-n to open a new RDC window, just as the new window function works in other OS X apps. Why is this so hard to get right? Please start over.

You’ve copied software in the past. Download CoRD and copy it. We can’t think any less of you than we already do.

Aaron

PS - Thanks for finally including scaling. You know all those requests you’ve received in the past about making the RDC window smaller? Those requests weren’t about lowering the resolution. They were about scaling higher resolutions.