I bought a new Mac Mini so I could use it for testing and developing my “i” apps instead of using my laptop all the time. I’m also old school and hate (yes, hate) the Mac keyboard and want to use one keyboard for everything. I did a bunch of digging and trial and error and ended up with what I think is now a really workable situation.

Here’s my setup now – I’ve now put the Mac screen on the left, then the vertically oriented screen I use for editing, then the main PC screen, then my email or extra screen:
<div class=”mceTemp”><dl class=”wp-caption alignnone” style=”width: 650px;”><dt class=”wp-caption-dt”><a href=”http://leonzak.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/2012-05-15_08-21-59_66.jpg”><img class=”size-large wp-image-392″ title=”2012-05-15_08-21-59_66″ src=”http://leonzak.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/2012-05-15_08-21-59_66-1024×576.jpg” alt=”My screen setup.” width=”640″ height=”360″ /></a>4 [4 screens – really ?]</dt></dl>At first I used the Mac keyboard and separate mouse – got annoyed with that pretty quick and went searching. Found a few solutions – did the vnc thing. It worked but not as well as I wanted – the updating of the screen and such did site real well. I kept looking. Tried Synergy – that worked but was not reliable on my system. Synergy would have been a workable solution but then I found Share-mouse.com with the product sharemouse.  This one is not free and they do what I also hate – you can’t see the price until you get to the actual purchase page. What the ^*^&&*(? I don’t get the thinking behind that – do they really think that I’ll get to the inner page, 4 or 5 clicks in and go – “Well, I already went through 4 pages I’ll buy it anyway now that I’m here even though it’s more than I want to spend ?” really? B.S. Put the freaking price up front.

Anyway, it’s $24.95 per copy so you need two copies – one for the Mac, one for the PC. But  – it WORKS. I use one keyboard and mouse. When I want to go to the Mac I just move the mouse over the screen and it and the keyboard are there. I was also able to switch the command and ctrl keys around to make it more what I was used to using on both PC and Mac. Well worth the money.

 

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