His payroll is not my problem, nor the market's. Also, that at a low price, the economics were not going to work out. He told me that he had a limited market (how many dual-wield laptop users are there?) and that he really liked to pay his developers. People who responded to a tweet about this topic agreed with me, too. But at $50 for my setup, even though the app is good, I balked. I would have been happy to pay something for ShareMouse, because it really is good. And when there's so much great stuff in the App Store for $4.99. But I still wasn't ready to part with my $50 for this little utility when the price point in my head was $0.
It's easy to set up, it runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux together, there's a portable version, you can drag files across machines, etc.
He peppered me with reasons that ShareMouse is better than any other paid or free mouse-sharing solution. I thought, "making it up in volume" was a sound tactic.īartels was not convinced. My thinking was conventional: if incremental cost for each unit sold is zero, one can make more money by getting as many people as possible to buy a product, by removing price as a barrier to sales. I was pretty sure that he'd make a lot more money by pricing the utility "fairly," as I said, and making it an impulse purchase. I was convinced that he had overpriced his product, not just for me but for everyone, and prepared to do battle with Bartels until he dropped his price. I e-mailed Gunnar Bartels, the general manager of ShareMouse in Germany. Synergy let me run everything from the big external keyboard and mouse that was connected to a Windows laptop. It's really elegant, it's price-competitive with competing solutions and other "KVM" (keyboard, video, mouse) switchers, and its developers do deserve to eat.īut I could not get my head around the $50 price of admission, not after flying free for so long with Synergy. Now, one can easily argue that $49.90 is a fair price for this software. Remember, you need two licenses to use the app. "Home" users can get ShareMouse for free. ShareMouse had detected a domain controller on my network, decided I was a corporate dude, and chucked me into the "pay up or get lost" category.
My app upgraded to the shipping version, and I got a message that I need to pay to use it in my "professional" setting. The ShareMouse beta period ended a few days after I started using the app. It does more than Synergy, it's much easier to set up, and is better in every way.
I installed it on my machines and had it running in moments, with no tears. Fortunately, I discovered an alternative, ShareMouse.
Setting up this free, open-source app is a black art, and when CBS replaced my PC with a MacBook, giving me two-Mac setup (which, I admit, is extravagant), I couldn't get Synergy to work anymore. It was a great setup.īut all good things come to an end. It allows you to use one keyboard and mouse on multiple computers: as you drag your mouse pointer off the side of one screen, it appears on the neighboring computer's screen, and keyboard focus changes too.įor years, I used Synergy to allow the keyboard and mouse on the Windows PC that my employer owns to control my personal Macbook when I parked it on my desk at work.
If you use more than one computer at a time, as I do, maybe you know of the utility called Synergy. If the cool automatic monitor and computer location algorithm gets things wrong, you can easily tell ShareMouse where each screen and computer is.