Review: Glance

• Article 43 of 89
• MacFormat, May 2007

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A picture paints a thousand words is a cliché, but when you’re trying to explain to someone what you’re doing on a computer, it’s a truism. Whether it’s because the person you’re talking to can’t understand the difference between “left” and “right” or things like the Dock, the desktop and screensavers are all mysteries to them, before you know it, you can waste hours getting nowhere.

Glance is an attempt to get round this problem by allowing you to share your screen over the Internet. In one sense, it’s far from unique. There are many systems already available for screen-sharing. Apple’s own Remote Desktop offers screen-sharing and control; Unix’s X11 system has screen sharing; there are many different versions of the open source VNC software for multiple platforms; and companies such as Citrix offer similar services such as GoToMeeting and GoToWebinar.

But unlike most of these other systems, Glance doesn’t require your friends, colleagues or customers to install any special software, doesn’t require a working knowledge of Unix and works whether the “sharee” uses a Mac, Windows or Linux.

To use it, you sign up for an account with Glance. For a personal account, that will be $49.95 per month, which will allow up to 15 computers to view your screen simultaneously. A corporate account for multiple users costs $119 per month. Discounts are available for both if you buy a year’s subscription.

After getting your account, you enter a password and username that will be used as the “gathering point”: if your username is MacFormat, you can tell everyone to head to macformat.glance.net. You then download the Glance application, if you haven’t already: there are versions available for OS X and Windows.

After that, whenever you want to share a screen, you launch the application and select the “Start session” command. Then you tell everyone the gathering point, get them to enter a randomly generated key you give them and then click the “Join Session” button. Hey presto, they can see whatever’s on your screen, assuming everything goes to plan. If you prefer, you can embed a couple of lines of HTML code in your web site and users can connect directly from there.

That’s the theory, but does it work in practice? Yes, it does. It works just fine. Although there were a couple of disconnections in our first tests, they failed to repeat themselves in later tests. We were able to connect to web conferences from behind firewalls, NAT routers and other network interferences; we could even join and host web conferences with other people on the same network, something that usually gives some systems a few headaches. All the same, the Glance application has various advanced settings for problematic network set-ups.

We also tested the system with Windows clients and Windows hosts, as well as a SUSE Linux client, and again, there were no problems that we could find. The Windows client did require a few nudges, with a pop-up not appearing when we needed it; it also required a small download of a Glance viewer application. But it was still able to view the webinar after those slight snags. Restricting Mac users to Safari is slightly irritating, but something most people can cope with, we reckon.

The Mac Glance application is a bit basic in some regards – more charitably, it could be described as streamlined and uncluttered, although keyboard shortcuts for menu items might have been helpful – but it does all that’s necessary.

If you’re in the market for a screen-sharing facility, then Glance is a strong entry and probably the easiest one to use that we’ve seen. It doesn’t have the full range of web-conferencing facilities in other products; you’ll have to rely on iChat et al to provide two-way communication during your screen-sharing session, for example. It also doesn’t allow anyone to take control of the other’s computer, making it less useful for technical support. But for presentations, it’s great.

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