RDC: The Last Tool You Need for Browser Testing on a Mac

We have to hand it to Microsoft on this one. Remote Desktop Connection for Mac is a slick, fast, and easy to setup way to handle your cross browser testing as a Mac-using Web designer. Remote Desktop Connection (RDC for short) is ridiculously easy to setup. It's fast and responsive, and is a cheap and effective resource for testing websites across platforms and browsers. It's like having VMware Fusion on crack, only without draining your Mac's resources. There is a reason designer rhymes with whiner; as Mac designers, we want and expect a lot of our tools. While not without it's issues, **RDC is exactly what we need for browser testing.** ####Efficient, Fast, and Easy to Use At ZURB, half our team has Apple MacBook Pros, "the design side." They're fast, portable, and reliable when it comes to Web development. However, being Mac users, we run into a problem any other Apple fanboy might: testing websites in Windows-based browsers. First it was Parallels, then it was VMware Fusion, and now it's RDC. RDC is just awesome compared to VMware Fusion, our previously go-to testing environment. Now, after a little setup, we're using one of the (slightly) older Windows PCs in our office as our official Gauntlet—a one-stop cross-browser bug killing beast. Okay, maybe it's not *that* cool, but it's damn easy. ####Is there a downside? Unlike VMware or Parallels, RDC **doesn't** support dragging and dropping from your desktop to that of the connected PC's. This also means copy and paste for files doesn't work between them—however, you **can** copy and paste text. Perfect for sharing URLs. Also, while RDC supports millions of colors for your desktop display, we've noticed a bit of choppiness in our larger images (especially gradients). The largest downside so far, however, has been that only one person can be connected to the machine at a time (we believe this is a Windows XP shortcoming). Still, our office can live with these small shortcomings when we're more efficient and effective with the dedicated testing environment. ####Remote Desktop Trumps Virtual Machine We all noticed a huge jump in resource usage with the latest version of VMware Fusion, and frankly, we all got sick of it pretty quickly. Even with 4GB of memory and a dual core processor, each time we'd fire up Fusion, it would render our computer inert for at least a minute. Don't move your mouse, don't click on something else, and for heaven's sake don't even try to use Photoshop at the same time. And while a dedicated testing environment might not work for everyone—freelancers might not have the resources for another computer in their office—it certainly helps in our team environment. It's fast, works over our VPN, can be up and running in under 10 seconds, and makes it easy to test all the browsers (Firefox 2/3, Safari, Internet Explorer 6/7). **So what's the lesson?** Simple: however you set up your own Gauntlet, be sure it keeps you and your team efficient and accurate. A remote desktop and a virtual machine are both solid options and have both suited our needs well.

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Want to give Remote Desktop Connection a try on your own? Head on over to Microsoft's Mactopia and download the RDC install and set it up with one of your local Windows-powered PCs. Be sure to compare it to your own Gauntlet and let us know how it goes!