Bosco’s Screen Share: Web Screen Sharing

Bosco’s Screen Share™
Easy, free, cross-platform screen sharing.

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Publish your screen on the web.

Overview Sharing your screen on the web is very simple. You can use web screen sharing to give a presentation to several people while talking on a conference call. Or you might use it on your home LAN to keep track of what your kids are doing. To share screens on the web, you need to enable web personal web sharing on your system and then start web screen sharing in Bosco’s Screen Share. You may want to adjust preferences that affect web screen sharing. If you are behind a router, you may want to configure your router to forward port 80 requests to your computer so you can share with the outside world. If you design your own pages, you can integrate periodic screenshots from Bosco’s Screen Share into those pages. We show you how in the final section.		Table of Contents `1. Start personal web sharing. 1a. Starting Personal Web Sharing on Mac OS X 1b. Starting Personal Web Sharing on Windows 2. Start web screen sharing. 2a. Your privacy 3. Preferences 3a. Refresh rate, image quality, and reduce 3b. Enable web screen sharing at startup 3c. Web screen sharing folder 4. Web screen sharing over the Internet 4a. Configuring your router 5. Integrating with your own web pages`

1. Start personal web sharing. Bosco’s Screen Share works with your computer’s built-in personal web sharing system to share screens on the web. Mac OS X both has a personal web sharing system built-in and ready to use. Windows XP Pro also has a personal web sharing system built-in. Other varieties of Windows may require 3rd party software.



1a. Starting Personal Web Sharing on Mac OS X Open System Preferences and click on the Sharing panel. Check the Personal Web Sharing box. Now proceed to section 2.		Figure 1. Turning on personal web sharing in Mac OS X.



1b. Starting Personal Web Sharing on Windows Hmmmm... right now, we have no idea how to do this or what software to recommend for those users who don’t have personal web sharing built-in. But we’ll find some answers soon! If you figure it out in the meantime, you can proceed to section 2.

2. Start web screen sharing. OK, this is the tough part. Sit down, fasten your seat belt, strap your helmet, and hold on tight. In Bosco’s Screen Share, click the Web tab. Now, check the Share Screens on Web checkbox. That’s all there is to it. You can drag the LAN and Internet links to an e-mail or chat window to share them with your friends. Windows users, you will have to set up your web sharing folder in the Bosco’s Screen Share preferences before you can click that box.		Figure 2. Web sharing is off. Figure 3. Web sharing is on.



2a. Your privacy Bosco’s Screen Share’s web screen sharing feature is designed with your privacy in mind. When web screen sharing is off, the web page is still available through your computer’s personal web sharing system, but the picture and text indicate that you are not sharing screens on the web.		Figure 4. Your friends see this when the web screen sharing is off.


The Privacy checkbox allows you a few moments of privacy (like to check e-mail or preview pictures before sharing). It is synchronized with the Privacy checkbox on the Interactive panel, so you can ask for privacy from either place. When the Privacy checkbox is checked, the web page is still available through your computer’s personal web sharing system, but the picture indicates that you are taking a moment to do things out of your friends’ sight.		Figure 5. Your friends see this when the Privacy checkbox is checked.

3. Preferences The Web panel in the Preferences window lets you adjust the way web screen sharing works. You can find the Preferences window under the Bosco’s Screen Share menu on Mac OS X and in the Edit menu on Windows.		Figure 6. Web panel in the Preferences window.



3a. Refresh rate, image quality, and reduce On the left side of the Web panel are the Web refresh rate, Web image quality, and Reduce web image popup menus. The Web refresh rate popup menu controls how often screens are saved to your personal website and how often friends viewing them through their browsers will automatically reload the images. Slower tends to be more reliable for home DSL and cable connections. Faster works fine when web sharing on a LAN. The Web image quality popup menu controls the quality of images saved to your personal website. Higher quality images are larger, take longer to download, and require more bandwidth than lower quality images. The Reduce web image popup menu constrains the size of saved images. Smaller images tend to fit easier into your friends’ browser windows, take less time to download, and require less bandwidth.		Figure 7. Web refresh rate, Web image quality, and Reduce web image popup menus.



3b. Enable web screen sharing at startup At the top of the right side of the Web panel, you will find the Enable web screen sharing at startup checkbox. You can check this box if you would like web screen sharing to start immediately when you launch Bosco’s Screen Share. You might find this feature useful if you use Bosco’s Screen Share to monitor your children’s usage of their computers. Set Bosco’s Screen Share as a startup (or login) application, and check this checkbox to start saving pages to personal web sharing immediately. You can then watch them from a browser on your LAN. 3c. Web screen sharing folder Also on the right side of the Web panel, you can set the folder where the web page and image are saved. Bosco’s Screen Share sets this folder automatically on Mac OS X. On Windows, you need to give Bosco’s Screen Share a little help by finding the right folder for the personal web sharing system you are using. Click the Set Folder... button to choose the right folder. The folder path is indicated below the Web screen sharing: label.		Figure 8. Enable web screen sharing at startup checkbox and Web screen sharing folder setting.

4. Web screen sharing over the Internet If your computer is on a LAN behind a router, and you wish to share screens on the web with friends on the Internet, you may need to configure your router to let your friends see your screens on the web. It is easy to tell if you are behind a router. In Bosco’s Screen Share, on Web panel to the right of the Links: label, there is a status message showing whether you are behind a router. If you don’t see the Links: label or the status message, turn Expert Interface off in the Edit menu.		Figure 9. You are behind a router.



4a. Configuring your router If you are behind a router, you need to do three things: Configure your computer to use a static IP address on your LAN. Configure your router to forward port 80 TCP requests to your computer. Make sure the personal firewall on your computer (if installed) is configured to allow port 80 TCP requests. If this sounds like greek to you, you might try reading our Router Setup Guide or find a smart friend to set up your router for you.

5. Integrating with your own web pages When web screen sharing is on, Bosco’s Screen Share periodically writes out a small web page and an image of your screen. The web page contains a little bit of JavaScript to cause your friends’ browsers to reload the image periodically. You can borrow the JavaScript (at right) and the link to your image on your computer to incorporate your screens into your own web pages. The script at right reloads the image periodically — every 30,000 milliseconds or 30 seconds — and ensures that old images aren’t displayed from the browser cache. You need to replace the `your_ip_address` placeholder and the `your_login_name` placeholder with values that make sense for your computer. It is perfectly OK to have the page hosted on another computer, with the image link pointing back to your computer. You can place this snippet anywhere in your HTML file, although it is customary to put it at the top.		`<script type="text/javascript"> var today = new Date(); var c = today.getTime(); function reloadScreen() { var address = "http://your_ip_address" + "/~your_login_name" + "/bss_screen.jpeg"; document.screenImage.src = address + "?" + c; c = c + 1; setTimeout('reloadScreen()', 30000); } </script>` Figure 10: Javascript snippet to reload image periodically.
You just need to add a couple more things to make this work: In the `<body>` tag of your document, you need a trigger to load the image and get the reloading sequence started. You need an `<img>` (image) tag with a `name` attribute that matches the name in the script.		`... <body onLoad="setTimeout('reloadScreen()', 100);"> ... <img src="http://address/~login/bss_screen.jpeg" name="screenImage"> ...` Figure 11: `<body>` and `<img>` tags.