Radio Bantik:
Days in the Life of an Alpha Geek

I’ve spent most of this week doing hardcore pair programming on a new web app that we’re working on at SEO Logic. But my daughter was sick today, so I ended up working from home while my wife taught her classes at the Homeschool Coop. We didn’t let this stop us from continuing to pair program, however.

If you use iChat, you may have noticed a small double-rectangle icon at the bottom of your buddy list:

So all I had to do was plug in a USB headset for audio in and out (echoes and feedback otherwise), select my programming partner from the iChat window, and click that icon to start screen sharing.

After a few seconds, he could see my desktop in real time and full size on his machine, while his own desktop floated in a minimized window. Either one of us could control my laptop, with full support for keyboard shortcuts… everything you would expect to be able to do if sitting side by side with a second keyboard and mouse.

Surprisingly, the one keyboard shortcut that he could not execute remotely, instead affecting his own computer, ended up being a handy one– command-shift-3, used to take the screen shot above.

I should point out that we were both on laptops with connectivity through 801.11g wireless routers, and there was absolutely no discernable lag in voice communications, keystrokes, or screen drawing.

A couple of years ago we were blown away by SubEthaEdit, which let multiple people edit the same document in real time. I remember wishing at the time that BBEdit would let you do that. Now with iChat screen sharing, that’s a reality.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 14th, 2008 at 12:41 am and is filed under General Tech & Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.