byte plight

technical commentary

TeamViewer - Free Remote Access and Remote Desktop Sharing over the Internet

Remote Desktop Sharing - Remote Access - Support

TeamViewer establishes connections to any PC or server all around the world within just a few seconds. You can remote control your partner's PC as if you were sitting right in front of it. Find out why more than 15.000.000 users trust TeamViewer!

Simple - fast - secure.

via teamviewer.com

I was thinking about using Posterous to post quick updates and initial impressions on useful software I find on the web (something which I do very often). For some reason, I've resisted using Tumblr for this purpose. Here is my first post, we'll see how it goes from here.

Today I had a chance to use TeamViewer on the receiving end of a demonstration. TeamViewer is a multi-platform (mac and windows so far, apparently), free for non-commercial use desktop sharing solution. I'm always looking for a great tool like this for demonstrations and offering remote help, but am usually put off by high cost or heavyweight (feeling) solutions.

The Mac client is currently about 5.8MB, and it took me all of 20 seconds to download and install. Once installed, using TeamViewer is equally simple: start the TeamViewer application and provide the other party with a ID and password which is generated when the application starts. In seconds you'll be sharing your desktop. If you are trying to help someone else who has just installed TeamViewer, the process is identical except you will be entering the ID/password auto-generated by the other parties client.

I can't even express how useful this service would have been on so many past occasions, but I look forward to using it from now on and will always have my bitter pre-TeamViewer memories to help me appreciate it.

FAIL!

I have to admin that Tumblr is meant for very shallow content only, so Posterous to Tumblr is perhaps not an apples-to-apples comparison after all. Nevertheless, here laid bare for all to see, the difference between the previous post as displayed on Posterous and Tumblr.

Posterous:



Tumblr:


Maybe Tumblr just doesn't like my post titled Posterous :P

Posterous!!

I use Tumblr currently (tacomanator.tumblr.com) for some of my shallow-blogging needs, but what the heck, Posterous has been floating around the web for a while now so perhaps it's time to give it a try too. Posterous and Tumblr both have an email based blogging interface, so I created an email group with both addresses, and future posts will be mirrored on each (Posterous has a feature to make this even easier called Autopost, but I'll stick with this method for the moment). This will give me a chance to build up some posts on Posterous that I can compare, apples-to-apples, to Tumblr.

Conspicuously missing from Posterous is customization features, which is, of course, good and bad. It's good because it's one less thing to think about, and one less thing to distract you from focusing on content. It's bad because people seem to really enjoy customizing (there's no shortage of evidence for that!). I can't help but wonder how the current state will last. I won't be surprised if some customization features do creep into the application sooner or later.

Some notable features of Posterous are:
  • Autoposting (automatically forwards your Posterous posts to your other accounts, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Tumblr (gasp!), Wordpress, and so on)
  • Bookmarklet for easy posting
  • Private posts (posts only for those who know the URL)
  • Custom domain name
  • Automatic image galleries
  • The list goes on..
I setup Autopost to Twitter (twitter.com/tacomanator) before posting this, so a link to this post should automatically appear on my twitter account as well.

Well then, let's not delay any longer shall we?