Remote desktop software

From time to time, you might catch me on my yacht, running an imaging experiment by remote desktopping into my rig from my laptop. I would use my iPhone, but I can’t fit all the windows for ScanImage onto the screen, even with the new Retina display.

If you also like to work in style, you might be interested in comparing different software solutions. Here’s a nice chart from RemoteDesktopMac, comparing different remote desktop software. The list is huge, which may seem unusual to some Mac users (who typically enjoy a dearth of choice, with the exception of fart apps). But it’s less odd when you realize that they simply grabbed all the data from Wikipedia and added nice icons. That’s fine, of course, they attributed the data correctly; and there is almost nothing anyone can do that wouldn’t improve the aesthetics of a Wikipedia data table.

Here’s the rub, though. Institutional firewalls are typically only compatible with a subset of these programs, sometimes only one or two. Similarly, routers are only compatible with another subset. Hopefully the intersection of these two subsets is not empty for you, and still leaves some nice options. But when you’re investigating remote desktop software, first check with your IT department, and then be prepared to buy a new home router if necessary.

Once you have it running though, it’s great. You can do computationally intensive analysis with large dataset on the go with only a netbook and an internet connection. You can help troubleshoot your colleagues’ all night experiment without having to get out of bed. You can use other operating systems without having to run a virtual machine on your laptop. It’s really worth setting it up.