Spy X 1.1.1 (Freeware)
SilverNetworks

If you're working on a solo project, then having all your work in front of you is just fine. If you'd like to collaborate or share your work with someone else, just invite them into the room. Hopefully, you have a big enough screen to handle viewing by several individuals; but when you want to share something on your screen with someone over a network, Mac OS X doesn't have an easy way to do this. Sure, there are commercial solutions like Timbuktu from Netopia and Apple Remote Desktop. But for basic needs, Spy X is worth a look.

Spy X is a program that you run on a computer whose screen you'd like to share with others. When you start Spy, it checks your configuration to determine if your Mac is behind a router. This is important since if you're network settings aren't set properly, you won't be able to share your screen with others. This sharing can be performed on any port, with the default being 2000. You can't set a port less than 1024 -- since these are reserved for Mac OS X network services -- but have no fear; all remote users need to do is enter the URL of your machine in the format of http://XX.XX.XX.XX:YYYY, with XX being parts of your IP address, and YY the port you'd like to share on.

Some of the Many Spy X Preferences

When a remote user connects to the proper URL for your screen data, as previously described, they'll get a Web page showing a screen snapshot of your Mac. There will also be various statistics, such as Total Hits, Current Hits, Date, Time and Mac OS X Version of the server. The really neat part is that you can also provide a live view, but limit the remote users by number or bandwidth. Annoyingly, if you try to use Safari to view a Live field, you'll get a message stating that "Sorry, Safari does not support Live. Please use another browser to view the Live stream." IE 5.2.3 seems to handle the Live stream just fine, however.

If you'd really like to share what you are doing on your Mac with others on the Internet, you can register with their Tracker. After this, when visiting the Spy Tracker Page, anyone can see what you are doing on your Mac. As a final bonus, you can offer a limited version of file transfer. Once you select a directory, if a user enters the name of a file in the directory, it will be downloaded.

So share your Mac for cheap with Spy X.

Have any other gadgets that let you share with others, like you really should have learned since childhood? Send John an e-mail and he'll review it.