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Sinter

  • An Accessible, Cross-Platform Remote Desktop Protocol

Warning: This is alpha software - it is released for testing and development purposes, but is not ready for end-user adoption. Use at your own risk!

What is Sinter?

Sinter is an innovative platform for remote access that supports screen readers and other assistive software. Sinter is portable across operating systems (currently Mac and Windows). For example, a Mac user can connect to a Windows remote desktop and read remote Windows apps using VoiceOver (the default screen reader for Mac OS X).

Sinter currently supports applications including Windows Explorer, Mac Finder, Notepad/TextEdit, Calculator, and MS Word. We plan to increase this list over time.

Currently, Sinter runs as a stand-alone application on the client and server. We eventually plan to make Sinter a plug-in for Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) and other remote-desktop systems.

How to use Sinter?

Please refer to this user tutorial tutorial.md to download and run Sinter.

How to build Sinter?

For developers who would like to build Sinter.

Sinter consists of two major entities:

  • Scraper - constructs the semantic hierarchy of UI elements representing an app in a remote Windows or Mac machine, and ships that hierarchy as an XML to the Proxy.
  • Proxy - renders UI elements natively from the received XML in a local Window or Mac machine.
Scenario Remote Local Scraper Proxy
1 Windows Windows windowscraper windowsproxy
2 Windows Mac windowscraper osxproxy
3 Mac Mac osxscraper osxproxy
4 Mac Windows osxscraper windowsproxy

Requirements for windowscraper and windowsproxy

  • Windows 7 or later
  • Visual Studio 2017 IDE or later
  • .Net Framework 4.6 or later
  • .Net desktop development workload to build WPF, Windows Froms, and console applications using C#

Building windowscraper

  • Go to sinter/windowscraper directory and open the solution WindowsScraper.sln in Visual Studio IDE.
  • After loading the solution, open Solution Explorer from the View menu.
  • Build the entire solution by choosing Build Solution from Build menu.
  • In Solution Explorer, right-click on WindowsScraperTest project as choose "Set as Startup Project", if it is not set already.

Building windowsproxy

  • Go to sinter/windowsproxy directory and open the solution WindowsProxyClient.sln in Visual Studio IDE.
  • After loading the solution, open Solution Explorer from the View menu.
  • Build the entire solution by choosing Build Solution from the Build menu.
  • In Solution Explorer, right-click on WindowsProxy project and choose "Set as Startup Project", if it is not set already.

Requirements for osxscraper and osxproxy

  • Mac OS 10.10 or later
  • Xcode 9.0 IDE or later

Building osxscraper

  • Go to sinter/osxscraper directory and open the project OSXScraper.xcodeproj in Xcode
  • After loading the project in Xcode, choose Build from Product menu.

Building osxproxy

  • Go to sinter/osxproxy directory and open the project OSXProxy.xcodeproj in Xcode
  • After loading the project in Xcode, choose Build from Product menu.

How to run an application over Sinter?

  • In your remote machine, run the scraper. If the remote machine is a Mac, choose osxscraper; if it is a Windows, then windowscraper.
  • In your local machine, run the proxy ( osxproxy for Mac, windowscraper for Windows). But before running the proxy, you need to provide the IP address of the remote machine in the config file (In osxproxy, the name of the config file is sinter/osxproxy/OSXProxy/Settings.plist; in windowscraper, it is sinter/windowsproxy/src/config.xml).
  • When the proxy application is running, click on Connect button to connect with the remote machine.
  • After successful connection, you need to click on the Load Processes button to get a list of applications running in the remote machine. This list is rendered as a List-View in the proxy application.
  • To run any of those remote application locally, double click on the application's name in the list.

How is Sinter Licensed?

Sinter is available under a dual GPL/commercial license. In other words, anyone can use Sinter for free, so long as they share their code (ideally back to this project) in accordance with the GPL.

Commercial licensing is also available; contact Don Porter [email protected] for more information.

How to contribute to Sinter?

We would love your help! To contribute code to the project, please create pull request on the github page.

Note that we require all patches to be signed off by the author, indicating that you are authorized to contribute this code to the project. By contributing code to this project, you are also agreeing that your code may be distributed under both the GPL and a commercial license without compensation.

Pull Requests must pass our unit tests (CI coming soon), and be approved by at least one maintainer before merging.

Contact

For help, please file bug reports on the github page using the issue tracker. https://github.com/oscarlab/sinter/issues

We will also be adding additional documentation on the project wiki and website over time.

This project is currently maintained by: