By Dan Moren

October 11, 2023 6:06 AM PT

ScreenSharingMenulet gives you quick access to Screen Sharing

Ever since I discovered screen sharing many many years ago, I’ve been an avid user of the technology. I’ve remotely accessed my machines while away from home, sometimes across the country or even from a different part of the world. And while the widespread availability of cloud services makes it somewhat less critical than it once was, I still rely on the feature.

For years, I’ve used Edovia’s excellent Screens on both macOS and iOS, but with Sonoma’s recent update to the built-in Screen Sharing app—including its new high-performance mode—I’ve decided to give Apple’s own solution a whirl.

However, one thing that I’ve gotten used to with Screens is the ability to quickly access my remote Macs via a handy little menu bar icon. Surely, I figured, there had to be an equivalent for macOS’s Screen Sharing feature.

After casting about for recommendations, a few people mentioned just what I was looking for: Stefan Klieme’s ScreenSharingMenulet. It’s a little no-frills menu bar app that just provides you with quick screen sharing access to other machines via macOS’s built-in Screen Sharing app. By default it detects Bonjour connections on your local network, but it also supports adding manual remote connections if you have other machines you want to log into.

(I will, of course, continue to use Screens on my iPhone and iPad, since Apple doesn’t by default offer screen sharing to or from iOS / iPadOS, an oversight I hope it corrects in the future. )

ScreenSharingMenulet is incredibly simple, which is fine by me because it just does what I want. I appreciate that you can even streamline the interface down to its bare essentials by hiding the About / Preferences menu. If I’ve got one nit to pick it’s that I don’t love the icon: it includes a little version of the cursor and every once in a while when I’m looking for the cursor¹ I seize upon that one instead.

But other than that, for $1.99, ScreenSharingMenulet perfectly fulfills its purpose, and that’s a rare thing for software these days.

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His latest novel, the supernatural detective story All Souls Lost, is out now.]

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