Control Your Mac With Bluetooth Phone

reidconti writes "Ever wanted to control your Mac remotely? Now you can, with the Sony Ericsson Clicker by Jonas Salling. Play MP3s or DVDs, command Keynote and PowerPoint presentations, all from your Sony Ericsson Bluetooth phone. Nifty proximity mode lets you pause your music when you leave the room and automatically resume when you re-enter." It uses AppleScript, to control whatever AppleScript can control.

Comments

Re:Hmmm...

[matthew.thompson]

Bluetooth includes encryption as standard and before a connection can be established both devices must approve.

This software only listens to a bluetooth connection from a specific device which has to have been paired with the Mac before hand.

It's quite safe - robably more so than having WiFi connections.

Think how many businessmen who use WiFi in Hotels etc have firewalls running. My Mac does all the time - even when I'm at home behind a hardware firewall.

Re:Can't seem to work

[Anonymous Coward]

Quit System Preferences, delete the com.apple.preferencepanes.cache file in your ~/Library/Caches folder and re-launch Sys Prefs

Some Additional Applescripts

[thefinite]

Here are some scripts that add to its functionality:

-DVD player - get back into the menu

tell app "DVD Player" to go to the main menu

-Start up the screensaver (for when you leave the range)

tell app "ScreenSaverEngine" to activate

(make sure screensaver is turned off or two of them will run)

-Telling you when you are in or out of range (so you know how far you can go).

say "You are out of range"
say "You are in range"

This application is so great. The possibilities are endless. -

Beware it's time limited

[rleyton]

The program is truly awesome in it's usefulness and geek-chic factor, but don't forget that it's time-(limited/crippled), ie. it's good to the end of February, which gives you a mere week!

There's no indication of how much it'll be to buy at the moment, but hopefully not too much. I'd not want to spend more than £10-£20 on this, as a techy it's of limited 'real' use.

Here's hoping the author will issue another time-limited release...

It Works?!

[Anonymous Coward]

This BT setup works flawlessly in my tests. Make the T68i (in my case) discoverable iTunes starts to play (as per my setting). Turn BT off on T68i and iTunes stops; also during DVD playing the BT device worked like any old remote, however, the T68i is color, screen is bright and the blue light flashing like mad were just things to note (not gripes just notables) :)... The concept rocks, where can we go next and how can I help???

Re:Great geek aid

[MacGod]

...it's saved me having to buy a remote from Keyspan

I actually own one of the keyspan remotes, and I gotta say, it's great. One of the coolest features is that you can program it for any remote (this only works in OS 9 unfortunately). If you know the bit time and frequency of your remote, you can point it at the receiver, press a button, and it will tell you what the command consists of. This is great for those of us with huge universal remotes.

Plus, the Keyspan remote costs $50US, the T68i cost about $100 more than a similar-but-not-BlueTooth phone from my carrier.

Getting Powerpoint/Office X setup

[jarrod.smith]

The PowerPoint control requires "Visual Basic for Applications" to be installed. If you haven't got it, PowerPoint will tell you. In this case, run the Office X installer and select only the "Visual Basic for Applications" option from inside the "Tools" dropdown - then finish the installation process. If you've already applied the Office 10.1.2 patch, you will need to patch it again. PowerPoint kept crashing on me when I tried to start the slide show from my phone until I re-applied the patch. This is a truly awesome application.

Scripts to automatically lock & unlock your sc

[blootooth]

I have proximity locking and unlocking both running beautifully here. 10-12 second delay for either. Big wow factor around the office.

Range on my T68i is way more than 30 feet. Maybe the author will add a range slider on the proximity tab. For unlocking you need something like Extra Suites http://www.kanzu.com/ ($10) or your prefered OSAX that can generate keystrokes. This allows you to enter text via AppleScript as if from the KB and thus unlock the screen. The 'type string' and 'type key' commands are part of Extra Suites.

To lock the screen use this as your action.

set previousState to do shell script "defaults -currentHost read com.apple.screensaver askForPassword "
do shell script "defaults -currentHost write com.apple.screensaver askForPassword 1"
tell application "ScreenSaverEngine" to run
do shell script "defaults -currentHost write com.apple.screensaver askForPassword " & previousState

This will not permanently alter the preference you have set in your screen effects panel.
To unlock the screen you can use the following script. NOTE! This requires entering your user PW as plain text into the script. Use this method with caution. A person who gets access to your box could, with the appropriate tools, extract your PW from the preference pane plist and then get access to your box!
Oh, I guess they'd already have that huh? ; )

tell application "Extra Suites"
type key "enter"
delay 1
type string "YourUserPasswordGoesHere"
delay 1
type key "enter"
end tell

Hoping this helps someone wow their boss into mac lust.