Nested Screen Sharing

ComputingOpen Source

I am starting a new spare-time project (more on this later).

I am using Maven, Spring etc. etc. within IntelliJ. While I have worked on projects started by other people using this tech, this is the first time I have started a new project using this stuff myself, so I reckoned I needed someone to review what I was doing.

So I contacted my good friend “M” (all names redacted).

We both fired up iChat and had a video conference for a while, M became interested.

Then we switched to an iChat screen sharing session to look through my code and show him what worked, this included me launching Screen Sharing.app to open a session to my server (so now we have one level of nested screen sharing).

M became even more interested.

M wanted to check out the code, so I fired up a Terminal and let him type in his own password into the htdigest command.

M then suggested that a mutual friend “G” would be really interested in this. iChat would not let me add G to it’s screen sharing session, so M shared his screen with G via Skype. Now we have 2 levels of nested screen sharing.

G cannot type into my machine, but we can all talk to each other.

G wanted to check out the code, but as he could not type, I made a password for him using the Password Assistant in KeyChain.app, then pasted it into our iChat text session.

G could not read the text easily, so I used Control-ScrollWheel to zoom into the stuff we were discussing.

M had compiled the project and wanted to run it, but could not set up the complex server the project connects to, so we reversed the screen sharing session, so I could set up his machine to connect through my VPN.

M and G make their first commit, adding their names to the project’s pom.

It was an incredibly constructive few hours.

And a very warm welcome to my two new collaborators !!!!