VNC ? RDC
Microsoft Windows Terminal Services allows Windows messages to be transmitted to a special proprietary client ... VNC is closer to X-Windows in having to transmit all the screen data across the network to the client, and in my experience VNC hasn't been particularly fast. Of course, the machine I was controlling via VNC wasn't very fast, so it's not particularly useful info.
My experience controlling Win boxes with the M$ tool has been that it is serviceable, but don't try to scroll with a document while trying to highlight, as it's all out of sync by the time the messages about the mouse and its location and the screen position all get sorted out.
VNC doesn't support drag and drop between the remote and local machines, like some systems.
Ideally, Apple would revive a version of what used to exist on all the NeXT boxes. NeXT offered remote post script windowing, with each application informing the client running the interface the status of the window using postscript descriptions rather than transmitting information about every pixel on the screen. It was lightweight on the network. Apple scrapped this when it re-wrote the windowing system for MacOS X to reflect the fact it could not affordably license PostScript from Adobe. To underscore what USED to be available: an app could be run on any machine, with any machine (with the app on it, or a remote machine) receiving the UI for the app. Remote PDF should permit this just fine in principle, but Apple when Apple re-wrote its windowing system, it was not thinking about its machines as members of a network but as stand-alone machines.
I'd sure like to see port forwarding features of OpenSSH harnessed to tunnel remote PDF. Old-timer NeXT developers have complained about the disappearance of the remote windowing capabilities of the old OS, and I can see their point. Apple could sell a lot of big iron to schools and other institutions, in my opinion, if it could tell them that their local machines were upgrade-proof (needed only to have the power to run the UI of their apps) so long as power for increasingly complicated apps could be added transparently as back-room servers. With the advent of Rendezvous, this is even more a realistic possibility: apps needing processor power could "discover" ready additional machines and tap their free clock cycles, while ancient clients kept humming away year after year. Sure, you have a hard time selling client boxes to people whose machines remain serviceable, but you gain long-term interest in your servers, you excite IT people about your customer-friendly solution, and you offer a very convenient user experience that can be set up at home without sweat. Rather than reinvent the wheel with remote connections, Apple should just use the battle-proven tool it already ships, the OpenSSH tool which runs whenever "allow remote login" is clicked. But Apple should offer better than a command line interface, providing a remote GUI environment to forward across OpenSSH's connection.
--Tex.
