Touchpad for iPhone and iPod Touch

Every once in a while, a technology comes along that both fills a need and makes use of an existing investment. For various reasons, I hadn’t gotten around to jailbreaking/unlocking my iPhone, even though I’ve had it for over 5 months. Yesterday I installed and used Touchpad for iPhone, connected to the VNC server running on my MacBook. Touchpad will work with any machine running a VNC server, check out TightVNC on Windows for example, one of many VNC variants. 

Touchpad is a client application based on the VNsea codebase, a graphical VNC client for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Touchpad works for iPod Touch as well, though I tested on a iPhone.

Touchpad is a remote touchpad to control mouse and keyboard input for a computer running a VNC server. Since the iPhone is one big touchscreen, which also happens to be sized similarly to a laptop, it’s a natural fit as a remote touchpad. Since both devices include a keyboard as well, basic typing is possible. The application pair, talking over your speedy home Wi-Fi network, enables the user to control a remote PC. This wouldn’t be of much use on a computer screen across the room, but in a home theater PC setup or with an interface designed to be viewed from a distance (Front Row, presentation software, photo slideshow), Touchpad allows users to do much of what a wireless keyboard and mouse would do, but in a pocketable device you might have already!

1. Jailbreak and unlock your iPhone. I am running 1.1.3 of the iPhone software. Part of the reason I’d never jailbroken or unlocked my iPhone was that I was worried about losing existing functionality, corrupting my data, or putting the phone into a irreversible state where I couldn’t revert to the Apple software. With iJailBreak none of that happened, and it was extremely easy to install as well. It took the advertised 2 minutes to complete.
2. Add the repository that contains the Touchpad application. Navigate to the Install > Utilities section of Installer.app and download Touchpad.
3. Configure VNC Server on the machine you want to connect to. I was connecting to my MacBook, which has a VNC installed already. Configuration worked as described on the site. Remember the IP address of your server, probably an internal non-routable address assigned by DHCP.
4. When installation is complete, configure Touchpad to connect to the server you previously configured as a VNC server. The description on the site worked fine.
5. Connect to your machine, play around with the mouse, command-key keyboard shortcuts, and typing information. More options, like the Function keys, are available in menus. Fn keys can be used to launch Dashboard or control Expose for example. Scrolling is available by sliding your finger on the right side. No two-finger scrolling is implemented at this time, by tap-clicking is, provided it is enabled through your System Preferences.

In practice, controlling the remote cursor in this way is intuitive and works fast enough to be useful. For minimal text input, especially when suggestions are filled-in, as is the case with URLs in Safari, the iPhone keyboard works well. I haven’t noticed dropped input, and the application has been very stable so far.

In the following video, I’ll briefly demonstrate launching and using Touchpad. I’ll open Safari from the dock, and browse a slideshow on Flickr. I’ve also been using Hulu.com to watch television shows on my Mac. Although I only need to make a couple clicks when watching a show, enabling Fullscreen mode for example, before Touchpad I had to be at the machine. I also don’t have a wireless keyboard or mouse. For now, Touchpad serves my need perfectly.

Once Apple releases the SDK for the iPhone, I’m wondering if a commercial replacement for Touchpad (and other applications) will come up. I’m also wondering how much interest Apple itself would have in developing a native application with this functionality. This type of convergence would be easy to advertise and could make an impressive demo, controlling an Apple TV for example.I’m also wondering if Microsoft has made an application like this for Windows Mobile devices. The integration with Media Center seems obvious. The next version of Touchpad will allow for arrow key navigation and more. It certainly looks exciting. The developer of Touchpad accepts donations, should you decide to send some dollars for the effort.

Finally, a couple of additional features commenters on the Touchpad website are looking for:

• Widescreen orientation for the touchpad, to more closely replicate the built-in one
• Arrow keys support, useful for Media Center and Front Row et al.
• 2-finger scrolling for Mac users