iPhone Home Controller
Using Remote Buddy to make your iPhone a remote control!
I got an Airport Express unit for Christmas, yippee! Finally the massive wealth of songs on my iMac are flying through the air and spilling gloriously from the speakers in my living room. It's awesome! Although setup was a little funky with my aging wireless router, once I got it working I was amazed at how simple iTunes makes it to switch between speakers via AirTunes, and how nice the music quality is. Especially cool is that, with one stationery and two laptop computers in the apartment, it's simple to control the flow of the music via shared libraries. Keeping a laptop in the dining room, for instance, makes it easier to play DJ without going to the office on the other side of the apartment when a track needs skipping. But even BETTER, I'm using Remote Buddy on my iPhone to control the tunes. I can use it to change AirTunes speakers from my office to the living room easily, and navigate through my playlists to find what I want to hear. Then it offers a simple remote-control interface to control the song or volume. This app is almost freaky because you can operate all kinds of apps via a set of custom menus, or log right on and control your desktop computer via screensharing! (I typed this sentence into the Flock blog editor on my iMac using my iPhone!)
Remote Buddy Screen Sharing
Switching Speakers
There are a number of apps with custom menus. These ones caught my eye as being especially useful:
- DVD Player
- Front Row
- GarageBand
- Google Earth (I tried this one, it rocks)
- iPhoto
- iTunes
- Keynote
- Miro
- Photo Booth
- PowerPoint
- VLC Media Player
I'm going to have lots of fun with this! I think now I have a great reason to put an Apple Mini in the living room for watching movies and photos and touring Google Earth. I live in an apartment so I don't want to go crazy wiring it, but I imagine you could control your house lights, security system, gate buzzer, garage door etc. from your iPhone as well. I'd love to hear from anyone who has done something like that! Now if I could only program the iPhone to change diapers, I'd be all set.
Tags: iphone, remotebuddy, apple, airport express, itunes, airtunes
