Aint that special » Programming

We are living in the future

Macgiver — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 14:29:22 +0000

If I had any doubt that technology was not living up to my expectations, I’m a believer now. I just installed iPhone Remote on my Mac Pro and all I can say is WOW! My iPhone can control my Mac over the Edge network.

iPhone Remote is brought to us by the good people at Google (code named Telekinesis). Maybe they got tired of waiting for the gPhone and decided to make the iPhone the device dreams are made of. The server software is a quick install. It’s a lot like a VNC server. It runs in the background and receives requests from some port that it is told to listen to. The server software then directs traffic to its own applications. Here is a quick run-down of what you can do remotely from your iPhone.

You can take a picture with your Mac’s video camera and receive it right on your iPhone (only one frame, not a video stream). Any file on your Mac at home can be accessed from your iPhone. How about taking a screenshot of your Mac’s desktop? Yup, you can do that. You want to do a Spotlight search for a file? No probelmo. I’ll illustrate a quick tour of the application below. The screen shots are taken from Safari running on my Mac Pro (since there is no way to take a decent picture of the iPhone interface). But you have to trust me, this looks great on the iPhone.

This first picture is of the iPhone Remote software running on my Mac. It’s very simple to use. Just open up the ports in your firewall and start the server. I like to have the “applications” open in a new window on the iPhone just for ease of use.

This is the main application view on the iPhone. Just tap one of the buttons. That background image is automatically pulled from the Mac running the iPhone Remote server. That’s my desktop.

This is the list of applications on my Mac. Did you forget to fire-up your BitTorrent client this morning? No problem. Just turn it on from your iPhone.

You can just as easily access your files. Click through directories and open up that PDF file right from your phone. I found a strange twist, that I don’t think was intended but could have very interesting consequences. When I clicked on a Subethaedit document that contained an HTML snippet, my Mac opened the document in Subethaedit (talk about remote control!) and my iPhone presented me with a rendered webpage, rather than the snippet of code. I don’t know which surprised me more, windows just poping open on my mac, or the iPhone rendering the HTML code. This opens up a very easy way to make your own web applications without having a web server. I’m not sure this method would support cgi though.

And if you don’t remember where that file is, just use the iPhone Remote’s Spotlight function. Here is a Spotlight search for the word “Perl”

A feature that has a lot of potential, is streaming media from your Mac at home to your iPhone. The server software can stream audio or video directly. You gotta have a remote to control that music, right? One is included.

While the Edge service may never be fast enough to allow for true Remote Desktop, there is a work around. You can actually select and then trigger Applescripts from your iPhone. This has potential to allow you to FTP upload to servers, start Backup software, or even secure a stolen computer.

Finally, for all those Leet Mac users, there is actually a Terminal application. Finally, we can run our cron jobs while we’re on the road.

The service works through a secure shttp connection, so you don’t need to worry too much about the data being transmitted. It’s all encrypted. However, it’s a little scary to think that if some nefarious person gets your user name and password, they can have complete snooping privileges. I like a suggestion I found on the Telekinesis Wiki which is to setup some Mail.app Applescript triggers. Send an email with the Subject “iPhone Remote On” and voila, your Mac starts up the server. Send another email to turn it off. It’s really just one more layer of security. You could even have the script look for a particular password in the body of the message before running.

iPhone Remote is a wonderful application. Apple may someday provide an SDK for the iPhone, but until then, a little creativity and elbow grease will carry the device a long way.

Technorati Tags: Apple, iPhone, Mac, Programming, Review, Security, Software, Tip, Trick, Web

One script to rule them all

Macgiver — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 19:36:16 +0000

I tend to listen to Podcasts (one of the best is MacBreak Weekly) while I work. But when my wife starts talking to me from the other room, I have to stop what I’m doing to navigate to iTunes just to click Pause. It finally reached a level of annoyance that made me fired up Script Editor and throw together a little script to do it for me. This is just about as simple an Apple Script as you can get:

tell application “iTunes”

playpause

end tell

Now, just save it as an application and bind it to some key you’re not using. I used one of the buttons on my Wacom Tablet. One key press and the podcast will either pause or play depending upon its current state.

It’s so great that Apple included a little hook for the Pause/Play function. This is yet another great feature of OSX. If something’s missing that you really want it to do, chances are that a short Apple Script or Automator Action can remedy the situation.

I think this little trick will hold me over until that new keyboard sees the light of day.

Technorati Tags: Apple, AppleScript, Mac, Programming, iTunes, Tip

Digging for code

Macgiver — Sun, 08 Oct 2006 14:18:27 +0000

Recently, Google labs introduced their new “Code Search” tool. This got me to start looking for similar search engines on the web. One of the nice one’s I’ve used is “Programming is hard” which has some nice formating, but limited languages. While many of the examples are way over my head as a new coder, these snippets have a lot to teach. I’t is mind blowing just how efficient an experienced programmer can make a routine.

As I said though, there are few good sources for Objective C, Cocoa, or Applescript. ALthough Google found over 200 examples for Cocoa related code. Of course there are plenty of publicly available sources for learning Objective C, but they are sparse with code examples.

Technorati Tags: Cocoa, Objective C, Programming, Applescript, Tip

Thanks for that

Macgiver — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 22:58:03 +0000

I came across this Wordpress blog post today. The author breaks down some fundamental guidelines for coding. To summarize: You should take as much care formating code as you would with an essay. This is good advice. I’m still a beginner when it comes to heavy lifting with Objective C, but I have already learned this lesson the hard way. It is much easier to find mistakes when you have the proper punctuation. Just imagine writing an essay without carriage returns, indentation, page breaks or punctuation. It would be pretty tough finding where you forgot to put that closing quote.

Technorati Tags: Programming, Blogs, Tip, Trick

Objective C #3 – Structures

Macgiver — Thu, 28 Sep 2006 01:20:09 +0000

It’s been awhile since I posted about my journey into Objective C and Cocoa programming. It’s going a lot slower than I had hoped, but I up to page 260 in “Programming in Objective C” so at least I’m not a complete slacker. It doesn’t help that most of the really basic material is as exciting as a wet shoelace. But today on my commute to work I read about Functions and Structures. This is pretty darn cool stuff. Functions are really just quick and easy methods, but Structures are where it really gets interesting. A structure is a way to group related variables together and then assign or recall values really quickly. Here is an example from the book:

struct date

{

int month;

int day;

int year;

}

This bit of code intializes a set of variables named month, day and year which comprise the variable called date.

struct date today;

Now we have declared a new date named “today.” Here’s the cool part. It’s really easy to set the day and year of your date as follows:

today.day= 21

today.year = 2003

That’s it. Now your date variable contains a day and year that can be recalled and reasigned as needed. The period simply says to access the sub variable “day”

You can even set the entire date like this

struct date today = { 7, 2, 2004 };

I’ll try to add some more later this week. The other thing I found pretty interesting is the use of Definitions (#define).

Technorati Tags: Apple, Cocoa, Objective C, Programming

Quick shot Automator

Macgiver — Sun, 24 Sep 2006 03:05:43 +0000

I use a lot of Applescript when I use my Mac. I’ve learned quite a bit about the language over the years. Needless to say that it makes me a little snobby about using Automator. For the most part, I hate automator because it is so limited. What it has is pretty much all you get to do. However, once in awhile I gain an added appreciation for its simplicity. Here is an Automator “script” that takes a screenshot and then places the screen shot in my blog photos library within iPhoto. I’m sure if I worked long enough I could have come up with an Applescript to do it, but Automator allowed me to do it in about 10 seconds of work. Here it is (and yes, I used this automator “script” to take the screenshot)

Technorati Tags: Apple, Mac, OSX, Programming, Automator, Software

Objective C #2 – Method Arguments

Macgiver — Sat, 26 Aug 2006 00:08:34 +0000

I’m still working through “Programming in Objective-C” (Stephen Kochan). Since I commute on the train, I have plenty of time during the day to read. I’m about a third done. I hope to finish in a couple of weeks. So keep in mind this is all still really new to me. I’m not trying to create a tutorial, but rather share my experience learning the language.
This one is very closely related to the previous post. This is about methods that accept arguments. If you break down this line:

- (void) setNumber: (int) n

We already know that the beginning declares that the method will not be returning any values (i.e. void). But the colon says that this method will be accepting an argument. The next bracket indicates that the method setNumber will read in an integer. The integer is named “n.” Just as a side note, the minus sign in front of (void) indicates that this is an instance method. The other option is the plus sign to indicate a class method.
Here’s a more complex one:

- (void) bounceBack: (Height *) b;

This one is a method that accepts something that is of the type class Height which had been previously declared. The asterisk is what tells us that Height is already a class. The learning curve is getting steeper now.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Mac, Objective C, Programming