Comments on: Use Your iMac as a Display

By: Francis Avila

Francis Avila — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 15:21:51 +0000

Read the article more carefully: Teleport just handles the keyboard and mouse; you still need ScreenRecycler and a VNC client to share your screen.

To change your Mac’s main display (i.e., which display has the doc and menu bar): after you have two displays showing up in the display preferences, drag the white bar at the top of the little screens to the screen you want to be the main display.

This ScreenRecycler solution is not going to be very good for very graphically intense use like watching videos or editing photos. This is because it has to push that extra screen through the network, which is always going to be a lot slower than a direct connection to a monitor. The colors on the shared display will be a little off and its image will have compression artifacts, aside from taking noticeable milliseconds to update.

I spend most of my day writing code in text editors, so this solution is fine for me. But if you’re doing serious graphical editing, you probably need a real screen.

By: Jean

Jean — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 23:20:33 +0000

I followed you instructiosn and now my iMac keyboard and mouse control both my imac (powerMac , Leopard, I got the old pre-intel version of teleport) and Macbook Pro (intel, Snow Leopard). But only my cursor goes from screen to screen. I cannot move finder windows or application windows from one screen to the others (I actually have 2 screen connected to my imac, both of them recognized by Teleport.

You say “I can even make the iMac the MacBook’s main display!”. How do you do that?

What I really want is running Adobe lightroom on my Macbook (twice as fast) but display the application on my Imac screen (much better). Any suggestions?

By: Francis Avila

Francis Avila — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 04:12:06 +0000

This solution works over the network, so all your need is that both your macs to be on the same network. If you use a wireless connection, you may not need any cable at all. Otherwise, a standard ethernet cable (Cat 5/5e/6) will work.

By: Barbara

Barbara — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 01:09:40 +0000

Dear Francis – I have an iMac G5 (iSight, pre-Intel) and a new PowerBook Pro. I’m wondering what cable to use to connect the two Macs for using my iMac as a display. Thanks very much, Barbara

By: Photo Sharing

Photo Sharing — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 18:13:37 +0000

I’ve been trying to do exactly the same thing.
I’m going to give your method a go. Thanks