If you’re like me, you only test certain software you’re developing on your main user account. For me, anything that involves syncing, I use a second account or machine for testing. As my second machine is a 6 year old G4 tower that sounds like an airplane, I don’t like firing it up. Today I discovered a really cool trick to make testing with a second user account more efficient. Tiger has support for VNC built in, however, it appears to only allow you to control the user that is at the console, in other words, the user that is using the machine. This creates a problem (fun things happen if you try it) as I want to control a second account.
A program called OSXvnc to the rescue. This program starts up a VNC server in each user account that you run it in (use fast user switching to login to the other accounts and launch this app; make sure you set a password). Then use a VNC viewer, I use Chicken of the VNC, to connect to the other OS X user accounts. This allows me to test from secondary user accounts, while still being logging into AIM, able to check my email, and develop from my main account. Performance is pretty good on my MacBook Pro. This will definitely save me a ton of time.