RDC Menu

I'd say it does more than just launch RDC, the bookmark feature is a huge time saver

My point is that if you could launch multiple copies of a program in the Finder, you wouldn't need bookmarks or RDC Menu. You'd simply have a folder full of saved RDC config files and doubleclick on those. I'm not saying RDC Menu is useless. Just that bookmarks are hardly worth $25. I mean, considering what other software you can get for $25. But maybe I'm just a little spoiled coming from the Linux world where developers don't ask for unreasonable sums (usually no sums!) for trivial features. Honestly, I'm tempted to write my own RDC menu with "bookmarks" and release it free just out of principle. :-)

Remote Desktop Client ALREADY almost has bookmarking functionality -- it keeps a running list of recently connected servers. I agree, $25.00 is waaaaay too much. The good news is that there are already other RDC launchers out there (look for them here and on Google), or you can just launch multiple copies of RDC by duplicating the app.

Making copies of the app is a pretty sloppy way of launching multiple instances. Anyway, I did manage to put together my own RDC launcher w/ bookmarks. I just have to finish the preferences pane to set the directory that contains the connection profiles and also to insert the app into the Startup Items for the user. It really was pretty trivial to do. Granted, it isn't as polished as RDC Menu. No language translations, for example. And it doesn't have a built in connection profile editor (but that was redundant anyway, right), but it gets the job done. With no hackery required.

Let us know when you have it put together enough to share... or, if you'd like to make it open source, we could develop it further as a team.

Ok, I don't have a web site for it just yet, but here's the binary and source if you'd like to have a look. http://student.pnca.edu/~misleb/RDCBookmarks-src.tgz http://student.pnca.edu/~misleb/RDCBookmarks.dmg (hope those get converted to links) This was partially a test to see what I could do with the RubyObjC bridge, so most of it is in Ruby, and not Objective-C. You'll need RubyObjC to build it. It isn't an Xcode project either. It builds with Ruby's rake. You'll notice that I ever so shamelessly stole icons (with some modification) from RDC Menu. If the RDC Menu dev wants, I'll change them. But, really, I think Microsoft owns the Windows logo. ;-). The idea behind RDC Bookmarks is that you have some folder (or folder structure) containing connection profiles that you've created with RDC. RDC Bookmarks takes that folder structure and creates a menu. The menu will be built to represent the folder structure. Let me know what you think. You (or anyone else) can contact me directly at misleb at pnca.edu. Maybe I'll start an official site for the program. I have not licensed it, but I imagine it would just be GPLv2. Maybe even BSD. I don't really care if anyone "steals" the code. Just don't take credit for it. ;-)

Oh, and one more thing. For some reason the Preferences pane doesn't always come to the front. It'll be somewhere mixed in your other app Windows (annoying, I know). I have no idea why. makeKeyAndOrderFront: should bring the Window all the way to the front, but it doesn't. If you can tell me why, that would be awesome. -matthew

Very nice! I like how you didn't try to recreate Remote Desktop Connections preference panel and instead just used the profiles that RDC already creates. If you're going to steal the icons, steal the grayscale one -- I actually created that one myself for RDCMenu :) I'd definitely be willing to create an icon set for you if you do decide to setup a site for this little goody.

I forgot to mention - it would be nice to add a generic "Launch RDC" item to the menu for those times when I need to setup a new profile :)

OK, that little hack is perfect (well close enough). As for a generic launch RDC, save a profile without a server name in it. I called mine " Generic" so that it appears at the top of the list.