I recently acquired a third monitor to use at work. It is really nice to have three monitors, especially when you have around ten windows open at any given time. However, I had one small problem when I hooked it up: the MacBook I use only has one port for an external monitor.
How is it even possible to hook up another monitor? Well…it isn’t. However, there just happened to be a spare MacMini lying around. This meant I could use Synergy on the Mac mini to give me the same effect as having three monitors hooked up to my MacBook. Synergy allows anyone to use a networked secondary computer as an extended screen. It allows full mouse and keyboard control between the computers. It’s basically a KM switch in software. It also supports basic functionality like copy and paste.
The particular version of Synergy I used is called SynergyKM. It has a visual configuration interface for Macs. It took me a while to setup, because some of the functionality does not work correctly in Leopard. For example, Bonjour cannot be enabled for it to work. Minor quibbles aside, Synergy works amazingly well and is very fast for being network based.
