I really like the Vine Viewer, but before I spend $30 on it (which I am perfectly willing to do) I’d like to know if the developer thinks a couple of suggestions are worth looking at:
Make Observe Mode by default, or in the Edit section have a preference box to connect in Observe Mode by default. Especially helpful when taking a peak at a remote computer to see if there is any action going on before taking control.
When expanding the main Connection List window via the bottom right drag corner, make the columns NOT auto-expand. This is the smallest of issues, but it’s kind of annoying to expand the window to be larger (to show more of the Activity column) and have everything else get sized up that don’t need to be (like the Port column, for instance).
Item 1: Good idea to override all window settings (old or current) and switch them all to a given mode, in your case observational. This will protect others from finding out if one is mousing over the window/deskspace thus keeping the observational mistake from happening where the cursor moves if the observer’s mouse goes into the viewing rectangle.
Item 2: Expect an option, defaults setting or feature in a future release. We agree, this is an annoyance and should be settable.
Regarding starting a connection up in Observe mode, there are a couple of things you might like to be aware of now, in the current version of Vine.
First, you can easily toggle in and out of Observe mode by simply pressing and releasing the Command (Apple) key (this can be changed to a different key in the Preferences). So you can open a connection and then tap the Command key to start observing without having sent any unwanted mouse movements to the remote machine.
Second, there is some support already for opening a connection in Observe mode. When you close a connection, Vine Viewer remembers the state of that connection, including the window size and placement on your local screen, and whether it is scaled as well as the Live/Observe state. So if you are in Observe mode when you close a connection, the next time you open a connection to that machine, you should find that it’s in Observe mode already.
I hope that’s helpful for now. We’ll consider possibly making this setting explicitly settable for a connection in the future.