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 ShareTool from Yazsoft (same company who mad the excellent Speed Download) is a program for Mac OSX 10.3.9 (or higher) that allows you to share all your Bonjour services though the Internet.
What is Bonjour?
For a detailed description you can check either Apple or WIkipedia, but here a short summary:
It allows sharing of your harddisks, printers, iTunes/iPhoto library, screen sharing in your LAN. No need to know any IP address, ports etc. Bonjour announces which services are available on one Mac and all other Mac's on the same network discover these services automatically.There is also a WIndows driver available which allows to use some of the Bonjour services, but I haven't tested this out.
The ShareTool difference
With ShareTool you can use this now also over the internet. Actually a quote from the Yazsoft website: "SHARETOOL : BONJOUR OVER VPN FOR THE REST OF US !". Well,I think I heard something similar not too long ago, as Steve Jobs announced Mobile Me... Well that's another story.
You first need to install ShareTool on two or more computers:
- One server which provides the services
- One or more clients which use the services that the server provides
- This also means you need at least 2 licenses, one licence for each computer you install ShareTool. Pricing see below.
 Connecting Server and Client
- Now you need to start Sharetool on the server and click on "Share". Sharetool will now show you which IP address and which TCP port to use to connect to this Mac from the internet.
- Now start Sharetool on a client and click on "Connect". You'll need to enter now the IP adress or domain, the port of the server and a valid account for the server.
After you have entered all these you can connect to the server, and this works without any problems.I tried these
- iTunes Music sharing, OK no problem
- iTunes Video sharing did not work for me, the Video shows just the first picture but the Video did not play.
- Harddisk sharing, OK no problem
- iPhoto sharing, OK no problem
- Screen sharing, OK no problem
Summary
ShareTool works as advertised though I think there might be some problems, when you use the default settings. To connect to the server you need to know it's IP address. Many people won't have a fixed IP address so you need to know how to use a service like DynDNS (which is actually directly supported by ShareTool).
But the main problem I think is that you need to know the port number, which is Random by default. So each time you restart your server or ShareTool you get a new port number, which is save but very inconvenient when you want to connect to your server, but you don't know the correct port.
You can change this to a fixed port, or you can choose that ShareTool sends automatically an email when it starts with IP address and port number. I think there should be some hint about this when you start ShareTool for the first time.
Overall ShareTool is quite interesting. I think it is very useful for those users who don't have MobileMe. If you already use MobileMe there are only a few features that are still interesting.
Pricing
As already mentioned you need at least 2 licenses for this, one for each computer where you use this.
US$ 20 for 1 license
US$ 30 for 2 licenses
US$ 75 for 5 licenses
There is a free trial available, which disconnects client and server automatically after 15 minutes.
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