Hi Yuma, You asked a number of questions about both the TrackPad app and using your iPhone to control a computer. Let me answer these separately, because I think the particular app capabilities (and even which one you end up using) are separate from the network issues.
If you're in a location which does not have wi-fi access and want to use your iPhone or iPod touch with your Mac computer there are at least 3 different things you can do: 1. If you're using your iPhone or iPod Touch with an app that works with your computer, such as the free Remote app that Apple provides to let you control iTunes on your computer you can use the built-in AirPort wireless card in your Mac to set up an "Ad hoc" network. In this mode, instead of choosing an available wi-fi network from the ones listed in the AirPort menu on the status bar of your Mac, you select the option for "Create network…". You'll get a dialog window for creating a computer-to-computer network in which you can fill in the name of the network in the text box (or accept the default value, e.g. "Yuma's MacBook"), select the channel to use on the pop up button (if you don't want to accept the default "Automatic" setting), and optionally check a box to require a password to join this network. If you require a password you can only set a WEP password, and if you want to allow Windows computers to join the ad hoc network you can only use 40-bit WEP (a password with 5 ASCII character) instead of 128- bit WEP (a password with 13 ASCII characters). Once you've set up your Ad Hoc network, you set your iPhone or iPod Touch (or other computer) to join this network (e.g., "Yuma's MacBook"). For apps that only need a connection to your computer, this works fine. For example, you can use the the Apple "Remote" app as a controller for iTunes playing on your computer across the room. If you got the "NumberKey Free" app from Balmuda, you can use your iPhone or iPod Touch screen as an input wireless NumPad to enter numbers into the Tables spreadsheet program, for example, or even to use NumPad Commander or to work with applications that may use a NumPad for shortcut keys. I've read that people who use the Sibelius music composition program on laptops have been able to use this app to provide a NumPad for the shortcut key support. Incidentally, I was going to add that if you use Apple's Keynote Remote app to control a Keynote presentation that you wouldn't be able to hear the slide pages, but that's not true as of the 3.1.2 software update that just got released. (It took about 15 minutes for this to download on my computer). I'd tried playing a keynote presentation that a colleague had prepared with this app, and before the update VoiceOver could tell me to start the slideshow or end it, and you could advance slide with a swipe if you toggled VoiceOver off, but you couldn't get any information on the content. Now, the page reads out slides by number (e.g. "Slide 2 of 12"). If you display in landscape mode you hear "Current" and "Next" labels for the slides. It would be neat if VoiceOver let you advance the slides by double-tapping the "Next" button and if you could tag the slides by label instead of just by number, but you can run this by toggling VoiceOver off for each transition with the triple-click home button, then swiping from right to left to advance the slides. You don't get any presenter notes read out by VoiceOver at present. Apparently the display on the screen of the iPhone or iPod Touch if you put the device in portrait mode and enable the option to display notes in the Settings, but you won't hear anything announced when you touch that area of the screen. (The same bug is currently present for notes in the Calendar app -- you can't access the notes, although in that case if you "edit" the entry everything gets announced from the edit page.) So, as of the latest update, it would be possible to control a Keynote presentation with the remote, and use the option buttons to start the first slide and end the show, but you'd only be able to tell the content by slide number, and you would need to toggle VoiceOver on and off to advance the slides with a swipe. I haven't been able to make this work with a pass-through gesture. You would also need to pair the iPhone with your Mac for the Keynote Remote app the same way you'd have to do with the Remote app for controling iTunes -- you have to enter a 4 number passcode when you set this up, and you have to simply tab and type in the numbers when you do it on your Mac -- you won't hear the fields or number entries announced. I don't know over how large an area the ad hoc network works, but it should be good across a room. The details may depend on your local wireless environment, since they provided the ability to switch channels. You can check the signal strength and data rate on your ad hoc network the same way you can with other wireless connections from the AirPort menu using Barry's tip about holding down the option key as you use your right or left arrow keys to navigate the status menu under Snow Leopard: http://www.mail-archive.com/macvisionaries%40googlegroups.com/msg08864.html (Tip on extra status menus in SL) This method probably wouldn't be great if you want to transfer data at large rates (for example, view a streaming video movie that's stored), but simply controlling a presentation, or using an app for data entry on your iPhone or iPod Touch is easy. 2. If you need wireless internet access for your iPhone or iPod Touch, and you have a Mac with an available wired connection through your local LAN, you can turn your Mac into a software base station by going to the "Sharing" menu under System Preferences and checking the box for "Internet Sharing" in the table. I wrote about this in a post about a week earlier that includes a link to a TUAW article: http://www.mail-archive.com/macvisionaries%40googlegroups.com/msg10685.html (Tip: Creating a Wireless network for your iPhone or iPod Touch with your Airport card) However, if you want to read up in detail about these network options (and the third one I'll outline below), the best and most detailed source of information is the "Take Control of Your 802.11n AirPort Network" from the Take Control series: http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/airport-n.html Read up on this in Appendix C. 3. To create a regular, full strength, wireless network that can attach to your Mac, anybody else's computer, etc., just buy an AirPort Express: http://www.apple.com/airportexpress/ The AirPort Express is a wireless base station that is about the same size and weight as the power adapter for your MacBook (under half a pound, and only slightly bigger when held in your hand). It lists for $99 in the U.S. Apple Store, or $85 for a refurbished model. There's a plug that lets you plug the device directly into a power outlet or, just as in the case for regular power adapters, you can pull off the plug end and connect this to an extension cable that plugs into an outlet. Apple doesn't sell the extension cable separately, but you can use the one that came with your MacBook or that gets included any time you buy a power adapter. Or, you can buy the $40 accessory kit that includes an extension cable with a 3.5mm to TOS-link connector, and 3.5mm jack to twin RCA adapter cable that will let you connect the AirPort Express to your audio sound system. Or, you can pull off the plug adapter and use a standard figure 8 plug insert which are standard in Europe. The connectors are also called duck-head plugs or IEC-C7 plugs. They're one of two standard types of connectors to the IBM/Lenovo ThinkPad power bricks (the European versions use a 3 bulge plug instead of the 2 bulge, figure 8 type plugs, I think), so if you have a Lenovo laptop or an old IBM laptop, just use the cord that runs from the outlet to the input of their power brick. This is just a cord that runs one end into an outlet and the other end has figure 8 IEC-C7 connector end. The figure eight IEC-C7 plug at the end will plug into the recessed figure 8 of your AirPort Express or Apple Power brick Adapter. It won't be slick, but it'll work. You can also buy separate world travel kit plug adapters for the Apple Power power bricks and AirPort Express that are mentioned with a product link in this post from the archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/macvisionaries%40googlegroups.com/msg04849.html The AirPort Express has 3 input connector ports: one for an ethernet plug to connect to your local LAN, a USB port that you can use to hook up a printer (also works to charge your iPod), and a 3.5-mm audio minijack for analog or optical digital sound. If you plug this into a LAN you can create a wireless network that supports 10 computers. When used with other AirPort base stations including other AirPort Express units, you can extend the range of your wireless network, since the AirPort Express units can function as remote access points as well as a base station when used on an AirPort network. If you plug in a speaker system into the 3.5-mm minijack or use their separate accessory kit (or just separately buy cables that give you the 3.5-mm minijack to TOSlink or 3.5mm minijack to RCA plugs to connect to your stereo system) you can stream your iTunes and other A/ V output to the AirPort Express, and then to the speakers. If you buy the AirFoil software from Rogue Amoeba, you can also stream from other audio/visual on your Mac to the AirPort Express (and other computers) -- you don't even have to be using Apple applications. There's some more discussion of AirPort Express features in this old list post from the archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/discuss%40macvisionaries.com/msg47168.html and Safari users can press Control-N twice to read down the thread to my response to a question about another AirPort Express network feature/mode (or just buy the Take Control Guide which includes all this information.) The main point behind mentioning the Airport Express is that you can travel with this and instantly set up a wireless network by plugging in an ethernet connector to a wired LAN into the Airport Express, and then running the Airport utility on your Mac to set up a network. It takes less than 5 minutes to do. If you travel on business and check into a hotel with a wired connection, you can use the Airport Express to set up a secure, password protected wireless network that you and your colleagues (in other rooms) can all log into, and share the same wired connection. And if you want to connect to a small sound system that will give you a better presentation, you can use the fact that built into the innermost end of the 3.5 mm jack on the Airport Express is an optical S/PDIF transmitter that lets you get higher quality audio when used with the Accessory kit (or with separately purchased cables that give the same functionality, and which may cost less than the $40 kit). I never tried this before a couple of weeks ago, because there was never a need to want a wireless connection until I bought the iPod Touch. I've had an Airport Express for 5 years -- dating back to the time when I read this list on a dial-up modem phone connection and didn't have an internet connection. I set up the Airport Express just to use for wireless printing. After about 3 years of using the AirPort Express on a cable modem service, I got nervous and bought a second one just in case the first device failed at some point, but I've never had to use this. So, a couple of weeks ago when I was traveling, I asked a colleague to bring this out so I could test this on a wired LAN (for my iPod Touch -- I already knew I could do software base station sharing through my laptop because I had read the Take Control Guide on my laptop the first time I found I wanted wireless access for my iPod Touch). This is really simple to set up. Anyway, you have lots of solutions for the network connection. I've been playing with some of the apps, and there are inaccessible bits to some of the ones that I've been trying out like Edovia's TouchPad. I was hoping to take some time out to try these more and report back, but this is going to take longer. You asked about creating a VPN. That isn't necessarily necessary. The apps that use the iPhone or iPod Touch to interface to your Mac can set up the connection in different ways. For the Apple apps like Remote or Keynote Remote, the functionality to communicate between iPhone and Mac is built into the application. You just need to "pair" the devices so that the iTunes or Keynote program on your Mac knows which device it should respond to. You can pair more than one device to your Mac, so if there are two of you with iPhones or one with iPhone and one with iPod touch, either device can be used to control the program. During the pairing phase a 4 number PIN shows up on the iPhone or iPod Touch screen, and you type this in on the Mac to identify the controlling device to your computer. Some software, like Balmuda's NumberKey Free app, has you download a desktop counterpart. You start up the program on the Mac and the corresponding app on your iPhone and iPod Touch while both computer and iPhone are on the same wireless network (which could be an ad hoc network consisting of just your computer and iPhone). Some software apps really do use a VPN, which means that you have to enable this functionality in your sytem Sharing functions. For example, Edovia's TouchPad app first requires you to first check the box to enable "Screensharing" on your Sharing menu under System Preferences, and lets you enable password protection for your virtual network. A few apps, like "RemoteTap", set up a VPN, but do it by having you download their software and launch it on your computer. The limits of what you can and cannot do with each configuration and how VoiceOver handles this (with or without getting toggled off) gets really complicated! The simple answer to how well you can use these different apps as a replacement Mac touchpad is that I don't know yet. They're all different in terms of how they work, and they may be different under Snow Leopard as compared to Leopard. And, as we've already seen just with the Apple Keynote Remote app, you may get additional functionality with software updates to the OS. I do already know there are some things that I can't do easily. For example, I tried using at least two of these apps to switch language input to Chinese for handwriting recognition, and the screen input is inaccessible on the iPhone or iPod Touch side, even when VoiceOver is toggled on and off. It's like the notes in Calendar or for Keynote not showing up for VoiceOver in these apps. There are also just too many settings to work through on the different apps to come up with an easy answer, and I'm not going to have the time to do it. Another complication is that some apps, like RemoteTap, use Soundflower (a freeware program that the manufacturers of Audio Hijack Pro use to route sound output to different output sources) for the sound routing, and that had to be revised for Snow Leopard. So even though I downloaded the new open source version of Soundflower, I don't know whether the RemoteTap app revisions have caught up with the new version of Soundflower. Reviews on the iTunes Store suggest that the older version of RemoteTap used to work with the old version of Soundflower. Otherwise, even the apps that share screens over the network won't necessarily share sound. Sorry for this inconclusive summary, but the app side of the answer is really hard to give without a lot of testing and time, and it's also really variable. I will note that TouchPad by Edovia announced a new function to use the app the same way you can use an Apple (infrared) Remote to control Front Row. That part of the app is really inaccessible. All you hear is "button", "button". If you remember the layout of the Apple Infrared Remote, you can make some of that part of the app work --- painfully! I'd much rather run the Front Row controls from my laptop keyboard, which you can do (if you press Command-Escape to start Front Row, and Escape to end it; use your arrow keys to navigate the Front Row menus that are announced, press VO-Space to move down selection menus and press Escape to move up, until you finally leave the app. All much simpler.) HTH. Cheers, Esther Yuma Antoine Decaux wrote: > > Hi ester, > > Thanks again for such a great indicator :) > > So with trackpad pro, it means that i can create a vpn of some sort on > my mac, and the iphone will connect to it? Do i still need internet or > can it be a LAN affair? > > I'm asking because the meeting room is isolated from the wifi for > proximity reasons and there's only a CAT cable > > So i'll try that method with trackpad pro, provided that its been > updated for 3.1 > > Thanks again, and best > > Yuma > > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
