iTeleport For iPad

Controlling a computer remotely from a mobile device may seem like a novelty — a party trick to show off how cool your iPhone is — or at best the preserve of sysadmins who require some minimal level of control over remote computers or they’d never leave the office. It certainly is both of those things. However, with the advent if the iPad, it has graduated to the realm of the practical — you might even say the essential.

Using a VNC (Virtual Network Computing) application on a small-screen device like an iPhone is like a dog walking on its hind legs — it can do it, but it can’t do it well. You might log in to your home computer to email yourself a file or check on the progress of a download. Perhaps you’d log into your dad’s computer because he’s forgotten how to send an email again. You wouldn’t attempt to do real work.

On the iPad this is not the case. On the iPad you have sufficient screen real estate that you can zoom in to a word-processing document enough to read the text and see a paragraph or two while you still have a usable-size keyboard on screen. In fact that is precisely what I’m doing to write this — I’m using my iPad to control Microsoft Word on my MacBook Pro. Neat, huh?

Of course it would be simpler to use Pages or Documents to Go or one of the other text-editing apps on the iPad — but what if you actually need some esoteric feature of Word that isn’t in one of those apps? Indeed, what if you need an app more powerful than the iPad can hope to equal?

I’m also using my iPad to control Photoshop on the MacBook Pro to resize and optimise the images that will accompany this review online. When I’m done I’ll use it to control Safari on the MBP to post the story to the web — Joomla, the CMS we use, isn’t very iPad-friendly but I can get around that limitation and many others easily thanks to iTeleport For iPad.

(For instance, if you are a fan of Flash games such as Treasure Isle on Facebook, you can play them on your iPad with iTeleport, albeit without sound. I wouldn’t recommend it for games that require precise timing or quick reactions as you are something if a slave to the quality of your connection.)

There are of course a number of VNC clients available for the iPad, but what sets iTeleport apart from the crowd is that you don’t necessarily have to have any special software running on the host computer. If you have Screen Sharing activated in Mac OS X’s system preferences, iTeleport will find your computer as long as it’s on the same network and connect to it as if it were another Mac. If you’ve got a bit of network savvy you can configure things such that iTeleport will find your computer over the internet — again, without any special extra software.

If you lack said network savvy though, despair not, as you can install the free iTeleport Connect software on your Mac or Windows computer, then sign in using your Gmail account. Sign into the same account on the iPad, and your computer is at your command. It is extremely easy.

Once you’re logged in you see your computer’s screen and five icons across the top of the screen. From right to left they are the keyboard, the control panel (featuring a variety of special keys such as arrows, function keys and keys pre-configured with key combinations such as Command-V for Paste and Command-Tab for switching applications. It even includes a del key for deleting characters to the right of the cursor — a MacBook Pro doesn’t have one of those) then the control keys (shift, control, option, Command), then a cog for preferences and an X to close the connection. The connection is also closed automatically when you leave the app, though I haven’t tested whether this is the case with multitasking under iOS 4. Multitouch gestures such as two-finger tap for right-click and two-finger drag for window scrolling work just as if you’re using a MacBook Pro touchpad.

The Preferences icon allows options such as rotation lock (not really necessary now that iPad offers that in hardware) and a touchscreen mode that makes the computer you’re controlling behave more like an iPad. Things like the document you’re working on moving when you drag your finger rather than the mouse moving over it, and registering a click wherever you tap on the screen rather than wherever the mouse pointer happens to be. This could be useful if you don’t like moving between the Mac and iPad ways of doing things, but I find it distracting because the mouse pointer is still there on the screen and I expect it to do something.

It’s also worth noting that you have to be a more careful typist using iTeleport than you normally are on the iPad because the usual auto-corrections don’t happen. Where normally near enough is good enough on the virtual keyboard, the Mac just thinks you’re using a normal keyboard and doesn’t forgive mistakes like the iPad does. You also miss niceties like having the apostrophe in “doesn’t” automatically inserted and so on.

Performance can be variable depending on the application you’re using and the quality of your connection. Word processing over WiFi is pretty much the same as using an app on your iPad, but InDesign over 3G is rather less so. You can optimise by opting for a lower-quality display. At worst I consider iTeleport’s performance acceptable for most tasks.

My biggest beef with iTeleport is a problem with screen rotation. You can operate the application with the iPad oriented however you want, but once connected to a computer the display locks to one orientation. That would be OK except that, when you’re using the Apple iPad case in its propped-up typing angle mode, the display on iTeleport is upside-down. This bug has recently been fixed when you’re connecting over the internet with iTeleport Connect, but not when you’re using Discovered computers over WiFi.