Use an iPhone or iPod Touch to Control Your Mac or PC

I’m still tinkering with various apps on my iPod Touch, and am delighted at the variety of apps that exist for it and the iPhone. One that really impresses me is Mocha VNC Lite. This little app lets you connect to your computer via a virtual network, and you can actually control your computer from your iPod Touch or iPhone. While I don’t find this to be all that useful, it is interesting and really illustrates the variety of iPhone/Touch apps that are popping up.

I’ve tested it on my iMac, but not on Windows. It is supposed to work on both, though, and the developer states that

Has been tested with RealVNC, TightVNC, UltrVNC on Windows, and Apple Remote Management, which is included with the Mac OS X.

(Update: As Steve Vernon mentions in the comments, he used VNC Lite on his iPod Touch to connect to a Windows machine.)

To have it work with your Mac, just go into the Sharing Preferences in your prefs panel and check it for sharing:

This will give you an IP address to use, and will let you set a password for connecting.

Then, after installing Mocha VNC or VNC Lite on your iPhone/Touch, just set it up to use the IP address and password you just set up:

Then just tap on the Connect tab with Mocha VNC, and it quickly connects to your Mac. Here’s a snapshot of my opening connection:

Using your finger on the touch-screen lets you move around the screen on your computer. You also have access to a keyboard and a mouse. I scrolled over a document I had stored on the desktop, and double-tapped to open it up, and also double-tapped on my hard disk folder to open it up in Finder:

Pretty cool, eh?

What I’d like to find next is a way to SFTP into my iPod Touch, so I can browse around inside its folders. If you know of a way to do this (that does NOT involve jailbreaking the device), I’d love to hear about.

Anyway, more and more cool apps are coming out every day. If I find some others that are really unique, I’ll let you know. Of course, I hope you’ll use the comments to clue us in on ones that you know about.