But I wish TidBITS would refrain from the “click-bait” headlines. “Abandons?” Seriously, shame on you TidBITS. As a paying member I expect higher editorial quality.
Gimme, and TidBITS, a break. According to dictionary.com, the second of seven definitions of abandoned is:
Even if port 5900 is not blocked you still need to fiddle with port forwarding for any setup behind a NAT router/firewall setup. And that will be 99.9999% of home users in the US. And for 1/2 of them or more they will NOT even know how to log into their router. As it was setup by their ISP/children/neighbor/etc…
Now AT&T will sell you a service for $5 or $10 a month to do such things for you.
Says he dealing with this just now for a client before catching a flight out tonight.
Well, I’ve been trying to use TeamViewer (“free for non-commercial use”) to get back to my home desktop for two Christmases. Last year if failed because an option needed to be selected in Little Snitch to allow use (surprise!) This year it’s kind of working, but they keep bombarding me with messages that my usage “seems commercial”, and that my time would be limited.
Are others being treated this way? I only used it once or twice at home to confirm it worked (Ha! for last year), and then my first out-of-home successes 4-5 times this month. I did once get to a page of theirs demanding I justify my non-commercial use, but never heard back after submission. Still now I’m warned each time that I’ll be cut off in a couple of minutes due to my suspected “commercial” use, and then I’m prevented frm reconnecting for 15 minutes or so after I log off.
Yup, same here. I only use the service for personal use, I rarely use it, and now I get routinely flagged as “it might be commercial.” Since they are ostensibly not monitoring what I’m doing, I assume that if you use more than 10 or 15 minutes, they start marking you that way. Not cool.
There’s no good spot between $0 and $60 a year, unfortunately. Back to My Mac killed any reason for companies to develop cheap non-business alternatives. It’s possible they’ll rise again.
Teamviewer nuked me earlier this year, and I’d worked up a spreadsheet and came up with a few possibilities for myself, none of which I am using now as each had issues I needed time to sort out.
Anydesk - I couldn’t figure out how to blank the screen and I had printing issues. They apparently have a free version
Jump Desktop - $30, SLOW!!! Could not get screen blanked and would have to dig though my emails to see what support said
Remotix - I was able to blank the screen but couldn’t not figure out how to print and exchange files. Slow as molasses but tech support was fairly responsive. They left the ball in my court IIRC. I will probably use this if I can figure out the speed issue.
I am currently using iTeleport because it allows a login just with a gmail account, which both of my clients have. I loved TV because they didn’t make me setup an account. All the ones I researched required an account. Most required monthly payments. If iTeleport has a remote print or file transfer option, I haven’t found it yet.
Abandoned? I have many things lying around here that I have abandoned as much as Apple did. But I also have a whole stack of Macbooks that are no longer usable for the sole reason that Apple has ‘abandoned’ them, even when they start up fine.
