Mac users out there have long been asking for and waiting for a rich and secure remote access experience with Access Gateway solutions. Now the wait is over. Mac users can now download the Access Gateway plug-in for Mac from MyCitrix.

Access Gateway team has made available Mac OX X plug-in for Access Gateway 4.6 Standard Edition and Access Gateway 9.1 Enterprise Edition:

- The user experience of the plug-in conforms to the native Mac experience, providing rich user experience.

- Mac users can securely connect to their remote applications, leveraging pre- and post-authentication endpoint scans to confirm to their corporate security policies. For stronger security, when the remote Mac user logs off,  the plug-in also destroys any session data (cache, cookies, etc) on the client.

- With globalization features, the plug-in brings this new experience to English, French, German, Spanish and Japanese users.

If you are a Mac user, I encourage you to go to the downloads section on MyCitrix and select Citrix Access Gateway from the drop-down menu of 'Search Downloads by Product", then find "Access Gateway Plug-in for Mac OS X, Version 1.0.2.23" under the Clients section.

If you are using this new plug-in, please share your experience with me and what you would like to see next.

Sai

I recently tried the newly released XenApp Plug-in for Mac, previously known as Mac ICA client.

Overall I had a good experience with it. It's simpler to use and feels more like native applications than earlier version.

Here are a few things I learned that you may find useful:

• This XenApp Plug-in contains a new component called Dazzle. Dazzle is an application that allows you to "install" your favorite published applications so that you can launch them easily later just like native applications.

• Dazzle doesn't however launch published applications.

• Launching from Web Interface from browser is still supported.

• Dazzle relies on XenApp Services (previously known as PNAgent service). Please make sure you provide PNAgent URL not Web Interface URL when asked about server address.

• Once you click the add button next to a published application in Dazzle, an application shortcut is placed in /Application/Dazzle folder. Then you can treat the application just like any other locally installed applications. You can launch it from that folder or drag it to the dock for example. At first I was not sure what happened when I clicked the add button.

My wish:

The published applications, once "installed", behave very much like native applications. One thing that is missing still though is the ability to drag a file from a finder window to a published application. For example, I would love to attach a local file to published Outlook by dragging the file and drop it into the outlook window.

There are certain behaviors of Dazzle that I wish were different. But once I learn how to use it properly, it is not a problem for me since I don't have a need to use Dazzle often. It's more like an installer for me. What's most important to me is the experience of actually using my favorite published applications.

Overall, I am happy with the improvements. Keep up the good work Mac team!

You can find another review by Orestes with pictures here.

Try the new the new Plug-in (client) now.

You can download it from here

I'd love to hear your comments and your experience. I will be happy to relay the feedbacks to the team who developed this release. If you are seeking help with an issue, I'd recommend posting it to this forum and leave a link to it in your comment so that I and others can better help you.

Ray (Ruiguo) Yang
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XenApp and XenDesktop provide the means for users to access their Apps and Desktops from a wide variety of platforms and devices. At Citrix our vision is to create a world where anyone can work and play from anywhere. Mobility is not new to Citrix. There are XenApp clients available today for Windows Mobile and Symbian devices, but small form factor devices have had their challenges. Slow, unreliable wireless networks, small screens and awkward user input models have relegated hand held access to small and highly specialized market segments. But that's all about to change.

The latest generation of hand held devices with their large, high definition screens and the availability of high-speed wireless networks are changing the game in a big way! A hand held device such as an iphone connected to XenApp via a high-speed 3G network yields a remarkably usable experience.

While serious content creation might have to wait for an external keyboard and monitor, consuming content like reviewing a spreadsheet or a patients records and simple tasks like approving an expense report are quite frictionless. And because you're accessing your content via XenApp and XenDesktop your access is fast and reliable and you never need to worry about your valuable data being compromised if you misplace or loose your phone.

I've been fielding quite a few inquiries lately about our strategy and plans for the iPhone. I thought it was time to let everyone know where we are and where we're going. The guys on our Mac development team in Chalfont, UK have just recently finished porting the core XenApp engine over to the iPhone platform. This was a great deal of work and the guys have done a brilliant job.

As you can see, pretty cool, but we still have quite a bit of work to do. During the next stage of the project we will be crafting a user experience that provides a natural, transparent and effortless user interface in keeping with the high standards set by our friends at Apple.

It's tough to say at this stage when we would have something that we could share with you but I promise if you watch this space we will provide regular updates on our progress and schedules as they reveal themselves.

Its the continuous and enthusiastic feedback we have collected from you all that has helped get this project off the ground. If you haven't done so already please check out Chris Fleck's iPhone blog and cast your vote.

Al-

Hello Mac Users

First I would like to thank all of you for downloading version 1.0 of our blogs widget. We currently have 1400+ downloads, and this goes to show that the Citrix community has indeed a large number of Mac users.

I also would like to thank those users who sent us their feedback, this version of the widget is here because of you, so keep sending your feedback and comments.

 Meet the Citrix Blogs Widget

 Version 1.0:

• The latest 30 Citrix Blog posts
• Adjust view from Full to Summary
• Collaborate with your comments
• Open posts on Safari or Firefox
• Spotlight Search (Instant search)
• Push updates (no refresh required)
• Watch blogged videos
• Check for updates
• Send feedback

 Version 1.2:

• Widget Resizing
• Bug Fixes

Requirements:

• Mac OS X 10.4 or greater

Download:

Citrix Blogs Widget

I want to use this blog to post answers to common and/or complex questions I get asked about Workflow Studio. One that has been asked fairly often is how to access the MAC address of a VM running in XenServer. The MAC address for a VM is located in the following object path:

VMList.VM.VirtualInterfaces.MAC

When you call Get-VM you get back a list that represents multiple VMs. Whenever you are dealing with something that returns more than one item in Workflow Studio you are going to need to access the individual items with the "For Each Object" task. As you iterate over this list of VMs you will have a new object that represents an individual VM. This typically has properties on it that you want to access, but in this case there is another list of things named "VirtualInterfaces". Because a given VM can be assigned multiple network cards we have an object that represents each of them, so we need to go down one more level using the "For Each Object Task" to get an individual Virtual Interface so we can access the MAC property. I hope that is clear, but since pictures speak more clearly here is an example:

At the top of the workflow you would call Get-VM and then use For Each Object to iterate over each one returned:

 

 You will notice that the For Each task has the little (s) icon representing it has sub-tasks, so if you double-click on that task you will be able to specify the sub-tasks where you will iterate again on the Virtual Interfaces:

And  then you can access the individual MAC address:

Hopefully that clears up how to get to the MAC address of a VM.

I just came back from BriForum in Chicago and besides the awesome event that was, one more thing came to attention, half of the Notebooks being carried around by attendees and speakers were Macs.

Carried away by the energy of the event I decided build something for our Citrix Community. A dashboard app that makes easier for our visitors to read the latest posts and collaborate with their comments.

 Meet the Citrix Blogs Widget

 With version 1.0 you get:

• The latest 30 Citrix Blog posts
• Adjust view from Full to Summary
• Collaborate with your comments
• Open posts on Safari or Firefox
• Spotlight Search (Instant search)
• Push updates (no refresh required)
• Watch blogged videos
• Check for updates
• Send feedback

Requirements:

• Mac OS X 10.4 or greater

Download via CDN:

Citrix Blogs Widget

—

Special thanks to Chris Anthony's group for designing our dashboard logo! Thank you guys so much!!!

The PowerShell open source reimplementation for "others" (Mac, Linux, Solaris, etc...) and Windows (including Windows Mobile and Windows CE)

With what we can do with Citrix Workflow Studio and the Citrix Delivery Center already, can you imagine the possibilities of what we can do with PASH, as Windows Poweshell has already become the language of choice for administration, intergration, and automation.

Here are some screen shots of PASH in action:

Continue at Source: Pash - cross platform PowerShell is out in the wild! Announcement

The Mac ICA Client 10.x has been completed and released to web. Thanks for all the Beta participants who provided their valuable feedback. Check out my earlier post for details on this client feature set. One new thing you will see in this client (compared to the Beta client) is a new icon for ICA. It looks way cooler compared to our previous Mac ICA icon. You can download this client from the client download page and remember that this is a universal binary client and hence can run on both Intel and PowerPC Macs.

To introduce myself, I am Sridhar Mullapudi from the Presentation Server product management team. I want to talk about our upcoming Mac ICA Client release and also request participation in a Beta program to give us some feedback. If you are interested, send a mail to Mac-ICAClient-Beta@citrix.com. As a Mac person myself, I am excited about this long awaited release. The main features in this release are

• Universal Binary Client - This client will run natively on Intel and PowerPC based Macs
• Seamless Windows - Ah! Finally. I guess I don have to explain what this feature is
• Session Sharing - Multiple application sessions from a user can share the same session. This means faster application launch times for subsequent applications.
• Improved file transfer speeds (at least twice as fast as before). You will see a big difference when you transfer files over a high latency link
• Session Reliability - This will let users reconnect automatically to the application(s) when connection is lost without displaying annoying dialogs
• Pass-through authentication - This is now enabled using Kerberos (the local machine and the PS environment should be set up to enable Kerberos)
• SpeedScreen image acceleration - This helps improve user experience when viewing web pages that have images etc.
• SpeedScreen Progressive Display - This is a cool feature introduced in PS 4.5 that dramatically improves (provides a local experience) when accessing 2-D applications etc
• SecureICA - This is not a new feature but we dropped it in the last client release and are introducing back due to strong customer request. Though Citrix strongly recommends using SSL for the ICA encryption needs, customers still use and like the simplicity of SecureICA and hence this support will be maintained for a while.
• Printing enhancements - Any printer available to local Mac application will be available for PS delivered applications. Users can also pick and choose their printer (not just relying on their default printer) and can change page sizes, layouts etc
• Keyboard Pass-through This will give the user an option of using Mac specific keyboard shortcuts that can be applied to the ICA Client itself (without passing it to the server application)

Mac OS 10.5, 10.4 and 10.3 versions will be supported with this client (though the recommended OS versions are 10.4 and 10.5)

Mac ICA Client is a high priority for Citrix and we will constantly innovate on this platform (we have already started planning for the next release). Some cool things we are thinking for the future are, ability to subscribe to applications (so you can put just the apps you need on your doc or desktop and can always have a one click access to them), much better integration with local desktop (use application icon instead of Citrix icon for the app on the dock, spotlight integration, simpler file type association etc). If you have any suggestions, feel free to share it with us.