Ah, useful information. I will need to do something similar in the future so it’s good to know it can be done. Thanks!
Ah, take me back!! I loved Omniweb, and had competely forgotten about it…
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I’m curious, since the Screen Sharing app uses the target’s Apple ID for access, do you run different Apple ID’s on the two machines, or are you using a different tool to do the screen sharing?
The story continues - part 2
I definitely appreciate all the suggestions, but I am mostly presenting this to show at times Micro$hit is hard to deal with, and for the humor. It has also become ‘for the principle of it’.
Note, for the following links you might be able to right click then chose ‘Quick Look Link’
From my last update, the version 16.43 (2016) of Mac Office would not activate, so I chatted again, getting Rina back, impossible, so you just about have to start all over again from scratch (I have the same problem with Ford Motor Company, actually over 4 hours made a complete loop back to an office I had already spoken with, and nobody would forward me to gal that pick up my case a week ago, who called and left me a voice mail, with # and extension (that X didn’t work). In that case, they refused to return a $100 charge that never should have been made, all in face as I told them this might affect me buying my next car from Ford soon, as I am drooling over the Bronco Sport, but the gal that left voice mail finally called back, and instead of returning $100, could give a $800 20,000 miles or 3 year maintenance package, I already had the extended repair/warrantee package. When do you say you’ve reached the point of diminishing returns?). My brother took advantage of this often in the '70’s, book daytime flight, then change to red eye, and instead of returning or crediting the difference most airlines would move him up to first class.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZgRpDOMtlzrnh_Z4UvdVWvMhIRe66m9W/view?usp=sharing
As noted near the end the lady helping finally realized this case was above her pay grade and referred me to an agent in India. After some initial background, he decided to just call me, sorry I don’t have a transcript of that conversation, but it went on for more than an hour. Quite unusually as almost every other agent said they could not make an outgoing call.
So evidently Muzammil could NOT put Mac Office 2016 into my Microsoft account. Right now only Mac Office 2021 is in my MS account, purchased for my MBP running Monterey. Unfortunately right after the chat with Rina, it showed 16.70 with $0 cost, $0 due, but I didn’t get a screen shot of that, where as my Monterey MBP had version 16.68 installed, so it seemed Rina did add it.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zEy0PHvD6pnU0bLGrgxJJmaQpM4-3jIK/view?usp=sharing
So in summary, when I run Excel 2016 (or 16.43) and it asks to activate, I give it my Microsoft account, and it looks at it for a while with a spinning gear then says it can not find license to activate.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CPtTWgR1XyeYszGLtc0qVMV4XKgEwJvm/view?usp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Lbe6BcBC4bhv275Kf_kUQSQ6RD9Tcwvs/view?usp=share_link
If I try to purchase 16.43 (or 2016) it is not available.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1KFevV8WkXoKrsYtlo13PVIIrzZi9SkW0/view?usp=share_link
Muzammil says the problem with activating is NOT that there is not a 16.43 version in my account, as I have 16.70. We proved that by installing/activating 16.43 on my Monterey MBP. It didn’t need any activation on my part at all, just ran (odd thing now I have a SilverLIght internet plugin installed dated Jan 12, 2023, Version 5.1.50901.0. I am so upset Silverlight went away, my favorite stock tracking website was built on SilverLight, and after Safari wouldn’t support Silverlight I got iCab. But the webpage finally closed and sold the code to an app developer, that charges like $100 a month!). Muzammil says the problem is with Apple, not allowing any version of Office Excel to activate on anything older than Big Sur or maybe Catalina, as a way to push Ventura. I have no idea why they can’t give me a new version of 2011, like I have, or 2016, with a product code. I have a real hard time believing that. When I try to active 16.43 on HS, I log into my MS account, it spins the gear for a while (seemingly talking to the mothership), then as above shows, says no license available, how does Apple get into the middle of this? Muzammil and I discussed what lpeting reported way above, like the 2nd comment. He had no comment.
OmniWeb was great, it cost 15 dollars I think. That drawer with previews of open tabs was unique.
No, I run both machines on the same Apple ID, and I use the default Screen Sharing app.
Screen Sharing is a simple-ish way for one Mac to control another. Running an application like InDesign (or any other) on the host machine uses that machine’s operating system and resources. The application does not really “know” that I’m actually giving it instructions from my working Mac, nor would it care. I think of it as a software-based KVM (keyboard/video/mouse) switch running over my network. Almost no lag, certainly no worries about whether the fonts in the legacy documents are available on my current machine, and it works.
It does kind of spook my spouse to see that iMac come to life in her office and start manipulating documents all by itself…
I have not used the Mac Screen sharing app for a while. However the Remote app for a mac from Micro$hit did work really well to control a Windoze computer. I think with the native Mac app to control a Mac, actually I think its generic and can control most any other computers if they have the correct ‘server’ on the host. But the Micro$hit one, you could have the screen on the remote be any resolution. The Apple one I am pretty sure you were stuck with the host’s screen resolution, not sure how that works if it was headless. So if the host had a large screen, and remote a small one, everything was real small, though I think you could make if life size and then just not see everything, and there were a couple of modes to magically move the screen to a new location as the mouse moved. Is it any better?
The story continues -3
Micro$hit not involved in this one. Holy Cow Batman, I just had a brain fart. My Monterey MBP is my home computer, the HS one is from my LLC, or work MBP. Usually the work computer had later, more up to date apps. Well I just updated the Monterey MBP from Mojave, and it had a version of MS Office, how about it, and do I have a product code for it? I still have the Mojave HD in tact (well actually it was a clone). It had Mac Office 2008, not quite as nice as 2011 or 2016. Copied, dragged, the Office 2008 folder (lots of stuff, add ons in that folder), over to the HS MBP. Some stupid initialization stuff like name, address (physical and email) and that was it. It ran, no product codes needed! I truly don’t understand how Micro$hit activates their programs.
Glad it worked! It sure was nice when you could just drag apps around :)
Diane
On many you still can do just that. Its the ones that need to setup other subsidiary files/subroutines, for example add fonts, etc. that you can’t. Many that you down load as a .dmg file, you just drag the app into an alias of the Application folder.
Years ago I spent a small fortune rearranging my office. I’d gotten a killer deal on a new desk and there was a perfect place for my G4 tower, but it was on the other side of the room. So I got a BT connector for the keyboard and a really long monitor cable so I could use it.
Months later I had a head smack moment for screen sharing. I don’t understand how I forgot about it!
I finally stopped using the G4 but use Screen Sharing to get into the iMac all the time (which also has a 4TB backup drive of years and years of stuff plugged into it), plus a headless Mini tucked under my desk. I also have a Windows laptop tucked under my desk and us MS Remote for that. The machine is flaky though, I’ve really got to find another solution for that.
(about the G4 - I still had it in the desk but hadn’t turned it on since my cat passed away, she loved sleeping on it. Doing another deep clean of the office and now need to dig out those monitor cables because it’s getting hung on boot somewhere and I would like to check it out before storing it)
Diane
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On one shelf of my huge book case (home custom built that stretches wall to wall) I have a bunch of shoe boxes with like kind cables in each one: telephone, monitor, firewire, USB, audio, etc.
So you just enter your Apple ID email, and the request to connect pops up on every Mac logged into that account? I’ll have to try that. (I assume the machine has to be on and awake.)
Also, how far back does Screen Sharing work? What’s the old OS version that supports it?
Matt,
I didn’t update my daily driver from Mojave just for Adobe CS5.5, and Acrobat Pro. I read about some features of Monterey, mainly live text, and decided it was time to upgrade and put the Adobe apps along with Canvas in either a separate partition or on an emulator. There was an article here on Tidbits about the Affinity trio of app a few months ago, and so I read a little more about them then tried the demo version. No looking back at all now. They are great, and the price is great. Some have distinct advantages over their Adobe equivalents. The InDesign equivalent, Affinity Publisher, basically also replaces Acrobat Pro (well all but electronic signing). But editing a PDF in it is by far much easier and faster than Acrobat Pro. So just use the free Acrobat reader to sign PDFs. Some have complained about the learning curve of the Affinity Trio, I maintain if you are at all savvy, the learning curve hump is easily crested in about 3 hours of use. Biggest complaints seem to be sending to Professional image setters, saving in some ‘pro’ format unfamiliar to me, and scripting. I have no inkling to look back, good bye Adobe.
OmniWeb was great, it cost 15 dollars I think. That drawer with previews of open tabs was unique.
OmniWeb with its tabs was the closest match I could find to the functionality lost when Cyberdog was abandoned.
Ah, the good old days.
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I think 10.5 Leopard was the first version to support Screen Sharing out-of-the box, but Apple’s Screen Sharing app is (was?) based on the VNC protocol, so you can screen share even with older machines running free VNC software. I forget the details, but if you want to run VNC on older systems and share screens with current systems, you might need to do some extra fiddling because of certificate/security issues.
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Back around 1996 or so, Apple had an AppleShare IP Server product and using a program called Network Assistant, you could project one host computer’s image on others such as in a lab or you could monitor these computers from the main one. It could do other things as well like distributing software or file storage for hundreds of accounts depending on the user limit. Help could also be given by taking over a computer which is more or less screen sharing in an earlier form. These computers would have been running System 9 at the time but I think you could go back further when it started but can’t recall. Once OS X was available, the AppleShare IP product became OS X Server and Network Assistant continued to offer the same screen sharing/monitoring features as long as the server software was running as in the original AppleShare package. I don’t recall when it became a standalone feature in OS X but it is a feature on my 10.5 laptop.
Minor correction/addition. I don’t know all what was required, but I don’t think much. But I could screen share in OS 7! It was to 68030 Mac IIfx, and from my Mac IIsi or PB 160. It was just in B&W. We sent out invitations for a conference our group hosted, it took days to fax all the invitations, which was several pages long. From home I could log into the Mac IIfx doing the faxing, see how things were going, restart the process if necessary, reboot the II fx if necessary (then call back), try resending those that had problems, or stop the fax modem from re-trying those with obvious problems. Thinking about it, I am not sure how I contacted the IIfx, pretty sure I used my either 14.4K or 56K modem, but the Mac IIfx at work was busy faxing so it wasn’t via its one modem. I think somehow it was connected to the AFB local net, and I PPP’d into it and connected that way. This was early '90’s.
I don’t think I ever had Timbuktu, I had heard of it. As far as I remember this Screen Sharing, remote operation was native. At that time I directly unofficially managed 8 Macs, also known ‘kind of’ as the Air Force Weapons Lab → Phillips Lab → Air Force Research Labs ‘Mac guru’. I also indirectly managed the Chief Scientist’s and his secretary’s Macs, but they were not on my local net. I was suppose to be a Scientist/Engineer, and this ‘duty’ was taking quite a bit of my time, and my boss and division chief didn’t know how to handle it, as between them and the Chief Scientist there was kind of an all out war. I also had made a ‘house call’ to the earlier Division Chief’s home Mac. I was kind of offered the Chief Scientist’s personal physician role but turned that down, wanting to stay as a scientist/engineer, thinking it paid better. This was part of why I got permanently transferred to a different division, one developing Adaptive Optics for Large telescopes, like > than 3 meters in diameter, and lasers for Laser Guide Star Adaptive Optics, that fully depended on Macs to run the telescopes and the Adaptive Optics systems, all communicating with apple events or something similar. That ‘laser’ work took me all over the world, and I became an international famed scientist in that field for about 10 years. We had to hit the D2a sub level line of sodium, ~ 10 MHz line width, in the 7th decimal place, this required extreme wavelength control and wavelength measurement capability. Laser is in quotes as our solution was not really a laser, however it did contained lasers, but it was a HIGHLY coherent light source. See ‘FASOR’ on wikipedia. It got named that, after an internal briefing on its design and operation where another high level scientist asked ‘where is the sodium?’. It didn’t have any sodium in it, its sole purpose in life was to excite sodium by being tuned to the D2a line, in the talk around the world about this technology any source that did that was referred to as a ‘sodium laser’.