Finally home and showered! Ridiculously busy morning...afternoon.
Anyway, while I was away, I tried my Remote Tap iPhone app to see if I could access my iMac. Worked great! Pretty difficult to do a lot with the rather small iPhone screen, but it would be great for checking on the status of any particular app and read its screen(s). Remote Tap has an amazing list of control options, single, double and triple taps, of course, for single, double and triple clicks. As I stated above, the keyboard acts a bit differently, but it also includes the tab, escape, all four arrows, control, option and command keys as well as the shift key. Can't remember ever using them, but I don't think it has the fn, home, end, page down/up or the forward delete (I'll try and remember to see if the laptop forward delete combo works...( fn + delete ).
Not all navigation requires the mouse. There are a series of buttons along the 'bottom' of the iPhone screen that give you access to the keyboard, the Dock, running apps, iPod controls, and even Spaces! It also has a 'magnifying glass' that places an enlarged view of a small section of the screen, perhaps a small button or icon, for easier selection.
It uses the standard iPhone, two-finger 'pinch' and 'spread,' but it also uses a three-finger touch for scrolling (same as the newer laptops?
). A tap, hold and drag does the same thing a click, hold and drag would do. There is also a 'right-click' function somewhere, I haven't had a need for it yet and don't remember how to access that.
So far, I can only access my iMac when I have a WiFi connection. It claims to be able to use 3G and even Edge, but response will obviously be slower and I'm not sure it would even be usable with 3G, much less, Edge.
Installation of the iPhone app and the pref panel are the extremely easy part. The bigger trick when attempting access via the interweb is having a 'fixed' IP address. Of course, most of us don't have static addresses, our ISPs assign us a new address every time we log on (usually). So, the first step was to sign up for a service that keeps track of whatever your current public IP address is. I use
www.dyndns.com, but there are others. Most offer a free service and dyndns seems to be enough for my needs. This service, in turn, requires the installation of a very small app that notifies Dyndns every time your IP address changes or at least every 28 days to keep your account active.
Once that is done, one opens the Remote Tap pref panel, set a password, open a particular port and select a few settings in Airport. After that, the only thing left to do is find a goat!
Might have a very limited niche to fill, but that it does so much and all works so well
and on the iPhone is simply amazing to this old guy!
"Men and their toys! Who cares what it does! Just look at how neat it is! And look at all those lights and switches!"
