We have Ignition…
By Mark Tennent in Reader
Posted in utilities, Internet, iPhone, Apple on October 25, 2009 at 1:57 pm
We have a hand-held vacuum cleaner in our kitchen. It replaced various rechargeable ones, all of which promised to suck so hard you’d stick to the ceiling but delivered a mouse fart for the five seconds the battery lasted. Our new one is 750 watts of 1970s technology, with a power cable long enough to clean the kitchen from one socket and a vacuum which can pluck a fly in mid-buzz at 50 paces.
In the 1960s and 1970s technology was simple. Harold Wilson had us Backing Britain in the ‘White hot heat of technology’. JFK had ‘New Vision Politics’ while the US was fighting in a country with no large oil reserves in a war largely caused by French control of rice production.
At the same time, the world’s first VTOL jets, supersonic passenger aircraft and manned spacecraft took off. Their pilots used skill, experience, spirit-levels and barometers to fly at Mach two. Cars of the 60s and 70s still got you from A to B and nearly always didn’t break down or drive into lakes because idiot drivers followed sat-navs unquestioningly.
Nowadays, you would never expect a netbook to run QuarkXpress while at the same time compress a DVD, FTP files, record live TV, download mail, and back-up a terabyte of data. Netbooks are relatively large devices, limited in usability by their keyboards, screen-size and batteries which in return means they run slow with a hamstrung operating system.
And then Apple upset the… apple cart. Their engineers saw most people already carried a portable device utilising silicone chips, powered for days not hours. They did away with components such as large screens, keyboards and disc storage. The iPhone was born. A pocket-sized computer with a ‘just big enough’ screen, virtual keyboard, various networking abilities and Unix-based operating system.
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Remotely useful
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Which brings me to LogMein, a little application which lets one computer remotely control another via a web browser. I have been playing with the iPhone version, LogMein Ignition, for a week and discovered it is the dog’s round objects.
Across a fast network LogMein Ignition is easy to use. An iPhone can remotely control the client computer (LogMein is platform agnostic), open and close programs, enter text and so on. At first it’s a bit like playing an on-line game from a server with a slow ping rate. You get shot before you see the enemy coming.
With LogMein, you click too late to hit the right option as they zoom past on the iPhone’s tiny screen. I especially found it was hard to hit the right dock icon on the remotely controlled Mac until I turned off magnifying and hiding. The action of magnifying dock icons made them jump to one side as the pointer slid across them.
Our wireless LAN was fast enough to create simple QuarkXPress documents or work on existing files. I adjusted images in Photoshop and used my Mac Pro as if I were sitting at it rather than three rooms away. It was soon humming with activity and I was able to check mail and do housekeeping tasks easily. Controlling a MacBook was strange because it had all the click and drag options turned on, which made control hit and miss over a network. Turning them off solved that.
The downside came when trying to run LogMein over a 3G network. Then, the slow speed of sending and receiving data made it uncomfortably awkward. Not impossible exactly but too slow for more than basic tasks, many of which the iPhone can do by itself already.
Prices for LogMein start at zero, with other more fully featured versions adding increasing complexity for higher prices. But the iPhone version does exactly what is says it should for a measly £17.99. Plus it will work with any computer which has LogMein installed.
As iPhone apps go this is in the mid-range of prices. There seems to be a space for an iPhone LogMein Ignition demo version, to give you an idea of what it will do before buying the real thing.
For me, working away from my office, it makes it easy to get back to my Macs from anywhere I can get a network connection for my iPhone.
Rated: 86.67% (3 votes)
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Comment by - October 26, 2009 on 9:07 am
HI Mark,
Thanks for sharing such an interesting & updated post overhere, i really appreciate this.. Nice information, keep it up.
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