RDM for OS X is getting worse and worse every year. Is it just for me?

Hello,

First of all, I want to say we feel and understand your frustration and I hope we can help you solve your problems, but for that we need to better understand what you need help with.
For now, from what I understand, you got issues with the general performance of RDM Mac and right now you have an issue with RDP.

I'm I right and is there anything else? you were talking about an issue with copy and paste what might be solved, is it really?

Best regards,

Hello Michel,

thank you for your reply.

At the moment I am not looking for help, but rather wanted to check with others about their overall experience using RDM for mac.

Thanks.

Eugene

I don't have huge databases like you so I haven't experienced most of your issues but I've also noticed in the past year or so the quality of the app has gone down. Many errors and crashes, much longer delays for bug fixes, missing features, broken features, etc... at some point my whole dashboard was white and unusable for weeks. My colleagues using the windows app have a lot of feature I don't have (not there or not working) . I was trying to use the new checkout mode settings and even if I set it to infinite I can't checkout the entry at the same time as other people. I can understand breaking things accidentally, but adding a new feature that's not working and still not fixing it after months is disappointing... It's like the devs are not even trying to do anything for mac anymore and just focus on the windows app. I just want to have the new features to work and not have a broken app for weeks. At this point I almost want to use the windows app in a virtual machine instead...

I can feel the pain behind every word you say. Have exactly the same overall experience regarding new and existing features in RDM for mac.
Do you think 5000 records is a huge database?
I also tried using Parallels and RDM for windows, but looks like macbook can't handle it very well.

I wouldn’t say that RDM for macOS is getting worse — in fact, it’s actually improving steadily. They’ve even fixed some bugs I reported and added features that were previously only available on the Windows version. Of course, there are still a few limitations, but from what I can see, they’re being addressed gradually.

The main thing I’m still waiting for is full support for FIDO2 and Entra ID user login over RDP. I’m also having some trouble copying parameters like usernames, passwords, and OTP codes. File transfers between RDP and macOS — and even between RDP sessions — don’t seem to work reliably, though copying text works just fine.

That said, Parallels with the Windows version of RDM really saves the day — all those issues disappear, and everything works exactly as it should. And once you enable Coherence mode — it’s just a joy to use.

For the past six months, I’ve been working on an M4-based machine, and I have to say — it’s the best hardware I’ve used so far. I don’t think the MacBook’s fan has even kicked in once, and everything runs smoothly without any issues.

Hi

I don't want to divert this thread or be seen to be making excuses, but I thought I would give some feedback on one point here:

File transfers between RDP and macOS — and even between RDP sessions — don’t seem to work reliably, though copying text works just fine.

Sadly we have a lot of constraints here. The file transfer mechanism works by "promising" the file to the clipboard, and then only actually transferring the file once the user "pastes" the file. This is necessary for obvious reasons (we don't want every file "copy" to transfer the file to the remote machine). Sadly, the macOS Finder will not activate the "Paste" option for a promised file; it only supports drag-and-drop. The traditional way around this is to use a virtual file system; but FUSE is no longer a possibility since macOS 10.15 (I think) did away with kernel extensions. The Microsoft RDP client implements their own virtual file system but we don't have the bandwidth to do something similar. So we must use a workaround - we repurpose some other macOS API that lets us simulate the copied the file being on disk - however, it's just that - a workaround - and isn't super robust.

More recent versions of macOS provide some "VFS-like" APIs that we can investigate to see if things can be made to work better, but I recall I did an assessment some time ago and it wasn't quite what we needed.

Finally, copying between RDP sessions is not something that I ever enabled, simply because there are a lot of moving pieces here and that adds another layer of complexity. It has been requested in the past and there is a ticket for that, I'll try to revisit that but probably a feature request forum post would help for visibility.

If you do encounter errors or problems with basic client-server file transfers and it's not inconvenient, enable session logging in the Help > Session Log window and when you have a failure, make a forum post and share the log file with me by PM and we can try to see if there's a specific issue. I haven't had many issue reports with this feature but there are definitely edge cases (external drives have a different behaviour, for example, and filenames with special characters are two examples).

Please, let me know if you have some questions or comments

Kind regards,