How to… control your Mac by remote control

• Article 58 of 89
• MacFormat, November 2007

Time was the Mac was just a computer – something to type on, do some work on or maybe play a game. But as they got faster, the Internet got plugged into nearly every home and everything started to go digital, Macs became much more. Now your Mac is a home media appliance, able to play your music, put on photo slideshows, and play DVDs, movies and television (if you get a TV tuner for it). Apple even includes a remote control with it so you can control it from the comfort of your armchair/sofa/bean bag (delete as appropriate).

Trouble is, the Apple Remote only does a few things, most of them with Front Row, except where enterprising developers have adapted their programs to use it. And if your Mac didn’t come with the Apple Remote, you’re going to be jumping up and down every time you want to change the volume or pause the movie to get your popcorn.

This is where Remote Buddy comes in. Costing only €19.99 (about £14), it lets you use a variety of remote controls to control your Mac, not just the Apple Remote, and expands the range of programs and functions that can respond to your sofa-based requests to include media players like VLC and Joost, as well as office apps like Keynote – there’s 95 applications supported in all. It includes a virtual mouse, so you can move the cursor around onscreen, and a mousespot to highlight the area of the screen the cursor is pointing at – useful for people at the back of your presentation. There’s a pop-up virtual keyboard that allows you type without having to go anywhere near your Mac’s. There’s a file system navigator, controls for putting your Mac to sleep and turning it off, access to your Mac’s accessibility functions to make the screen clearer to read at a distance. And it integrates it all together in one big control centre.

First, you’ll need a remote. Got a Wii or a PS3? An iPhone or an iPod Touch? A Keyspan Digital Media or Griffin AirClick Remote? Maybe you have a Sony Ericsson mobile phone. Remote Buddy works with all of them. All you need to do is pair them up with your Mac with Remote Buddy and you’ve instantly got access to all of Remote Buddy’s remote control functions.

Remote Buddy works using a menu, ‘behaviours’ and ‘actions’. The menu gives you access to all Remote Buddy’s functions. Actions are sort of self-explanatory: they’re things you can get your Mac to do when you press a button on your remote control – if you’re clever, you can take advantage of Remote Buddy’s settings to change what it does depending on how long you hold down a remote key. ‘Behaviours’ are collections of actions. Normally, you configure actions according to the application you’re in, but you can create arbitrary sets of behaviours and multiple sets for the same application – or if you have more than one remote control, different behaviours for each remote. In this tutorial, we’re going to show you what Remote Buddy can do and how you can configure it to take control of your Mac from you’re the comfort of whatever seat you choose.