Smartphone Remote Control for Your Mac

Use your Nokia phone to control applications on your Mac, including iTunes, iPhoto, DVD Player, KeyNote, PowerPoint, and much more.

ControlFreak is a very useful remote control program for Windows PCs. But how about Mac users? Mac computers come bundled with beautiful hardware and very powerful multimedia software that make them the perfect entertainment control center at home or on the road. Can we control them remotely via our phones as well? Sure, using a product called Salling Clicker.

Salling Clicker is a Bluetooth-based remote control program for Mac OS X. Written by Jonas Salling, it works on Nokia Series 60 and several other mobile phones. You can download/purchase it from http://homepage.mac.com/jonassalling/Shareware/Clicker/.

Like ControlFreak, Salling Clicker is a two-part program that includes a controller agent module on the computer and a UI module on the phone. The controller agent is installed into the Other section of the Mac's System Preferences. You can configure the behavior of the remote control by clicking the Salling Clicker icon.

Once you start the agent by clicking the Salling Clicker icon in System Preferences, it runs in the background and listens for Bluetooth connections from the phone. An icon in the system menu bar indicates the connection status (see Figure 7-15). You can also use the menu bar icon to quickly access Salling Clicker without going through the System Preferences window.

On the phone, you just need to install the Salling Clicker program. The program provides the phone UI for the remote control. You can initiate a connection from the Mac to the phone or from the phone to the Mac. Once the connection is established, it is kept active. From my experiments, it seems that computer-initiated connections are more reliable.

Now, with the software properly installed, let's explore the key functionality of the Salling Clicker program.