Good VNC client

Question

Level 1

29 points

Good VNC client

I am looking for a good VNC client that performs well. The best performer I have found is Apple's own Screensharing app, but it is rather poor on UI e.g. you can't even remember connections. Is there a third party app out there that does as well as regards performance. I have tried COVNC and JollyFastVNC but have issues with both of them. I usually end up using a Windows program TightVNC running via VMFusion which surprisingly gives better performance than the native Mac apps.

Unibody Macbook, Mac OS X (10.6.3)

Posted on May 4, 2010 3:33 AM

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Answer 1

Fortuny

Level 7

21,461 points

May 4, 2010 5:42 AM in response to tonydenson

Hi Tony,

I am using Jolly for quite some time for connecting to a Windows network at the office which uses RealVNC as server.
Apart from some speed problems (when the other guys are Skyping) or when the hardware Firewall in the officedoesn't want to let me in, I don't have any kind of problems.
Have you contacted the author of Jolly about your problems ? Seems to be a nice guy.

AFAIK, you already have tried all possibilities there are for VNC on a Mac.

Regards

Stefan

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Answer 2

tonydenson Author

Level 1

29 points

May 4, 2010 6:40 AM in response to Fortuny

Have you contacted the author of Jolly about your problems ? Seems to be a nice guy.

AFAIK, you already have tried all possibilities there are for VNC on a Mac.

My main gripe with Jolly is actually the UI, I just find it a bit unintuitive.
There are other clients e.g. Jaadu VNC - but that requires a Jaadu VNC server.
I just did a bit of performance timing and I found that when dragging a Finder window an inch across the screen Jolly took 9 seconds, but Apple's Screensharing took 3 seconds. Perhaps I'll stick with Screensharing and add some of my hosts as Textexpander snippets.
The other thing about Screensharing is that the response, although a little sluggish compared with real time is pretty immediate, but with the others you can wait 5 or 10 seconds before anything visually happens at all - this can lead an impatient person (like me) to start randomly moving the mouse around and getting in a right tangle.

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Answer 3

BobHarris

Level 9

57,071 points

May 4, 2010 7:31 AM in response to tonydenson

JollysFastVNC is one of the better general purpose Mac OS X VNC clients.

If you want to have bookmarks for Mac OS X Screen Sharing connections, you can use Safari.

Create bookmarks of the form: vnc://address.of.system

You can drag the URL from the Safari Location field to a folder and later double click on that file to start a VNC connection. So you can have a folder full of VNC connections, or you can just use bookmarks stored in Safari to start VNC connections.

If you need a different port number use: vnc://address.of.system:5903

If you need to use a different username, try: vnc://username@address.of.system

It is possible to install a Unix vncviewer that runs as an X11 window using MacPorts.org or Fink.sf.net. I think the vncviewer uses the TightVNC compression protocols. However, the UI is very much X11 oriented, and Copy & Paste is annoyingly different/difficult.

Message was edited by: BobHarris

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Answer 4

tonydenson Author

Level 1

29 points

May 4, 2010 8:53 AM in response to BobHarris

BobHarris wrote:
If you want to have bookmarks for Mac OS X Screen Sharing connections, you can use Safari.

Create bookmarks of the form: vnc://address.of.system

Excellent ! Works a treat, thanks.

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Answer 5

Fortuny

Level 7

21,461 points

May 4, 2010 8:13 PM in response to tonydenson

Hi Tony and Bob,

thanks for the informations on Screensharing and the bookmarks possibility.

Have to have a look at this some time soon, since screensharing seems to be faster than Jolly.

Happy computing

Stefan

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