And the Award for Best PC Media Remote Goes to… the iPod Touch

(Sorry, just finished a fast-forwarding through 5 hours of DVR’d Oscar extravaganza, and I’ve got pompous self-importance on the brain.)

I recently settled upon connecting my PC directly to my HDTV as the best solution for watching AVI and WMV computer video files on the tv. Everything was great, except I had no convenient way to control the 20’ distant PC from my couch. So now that I had settled upon the most efficient media setup, I needed to research the most effective remote.

The standard and most easily found PC remotes come in two flavors, infrared (IR) like your basic tv and DVD payer remotes that need to be aimed at the machine, and radio (RF) like cordless phones that can communicate in any direction and through walls up to a certain distance. IR was not an option because my PC is not located where a connected IR receiver device is visible from the couch, so I wouldn’t be able to aim the remote where it needed to be aimed (without jury-rigging some USB extension cable thing and wiring the receiver to the tv as well, but I already have enough cabling running around the house). RF remotes would have been the answer, but the cheapest decent one I found was the Firefly at $50. Remotes such as the Firefly bill themselves as “universal” remotes, but for a lot of specialized hardware (like my Motorola DVR from Comcast) these remotes simply don’t have the functionality. My Comcast remote won’t easily control the PC, and the PC remote won’t easily control the DVR, so the PC remote would end up being relegated to the simple duty of running videos. $50 is more than I wanted to spend on a single function device that would only control the media center, and at that price I thought I might be better served by a wireless keyboard and mouse combo so I could have complete control and also use the tv for convenient websurfing if I so chose.

That turned me off the simple remote solutions and got me searching for the coolest wireless mouse. My favorite solutions for that were Kensington’s Slimblade Media Mouse and Media Presenter Mouse. Both are Bluetooth laser mice on one side, and flip them over for a media remote on the underside. The presenter also has the additional cool feature that the middle button rollerball is a full trackball as well, allowing complete mouse control in without a mousing surface. Neither is cheap, at $50 and $80, but they are cool wireless mice that allow the full control I desired.

The Kensington mice seemed a great solution, however in my search for the best wireless mouse I learned that you can control your PC with your iPod Touch or iPhone. Intrigued, I found a handful of apps that will do this, ranging from too simplistic to overly complex. The simple free apps like Apple’s Remote and VLC Remote are geared just toward iTunes or other media applications and won’t do more extensive video and desktop control. More complex apps, like Mochasoft’s Remote Desktop, are actually complete VNC or Windows Remote Desktop clients which tie into the PC and give you complete remote access to all the computer’s functions, so far as to have a virtual representation of the computer desktop on the iPod screen. The simple media apps just didn’t give me the flexibility I needed, and the full remotes were too cumbersome – who wants to navigate a huge PC monitor display and make menu selections on a tiny hand-held screen? Not I.

Luckily I came across two great apps that bridge the gap between simple and complex and make the near-perfect media remote solution. Neither are free, but they are cheap and absolutely worth it. So much so I bought and use both.

The first is Zemote ($3.99). This brilliant app is designed for exactly what I want: a simple interface that commands all Media Center’s functions, and alternative sophisticated mouse control for when I need to deal with other PC applications. The apps three main screens are the media remote, trackpad, and keyboard.

The trackpad allows full cursor control just like a notebook pad, with right and left mouse buttons and scroll bar. In addition, using the iPod’s built-in accelerometer one can hold the dual-arrow button in the lower left corner and move the iPod in the air and control the cursor movement. Mouse control is frustrating, especially via the accelerometer, but it works.

The keyboard is straightforward, but is a full virtual PC keyboard including Windows, Function, and Control keys, as opposed to the mere text entry keyboard native to the iPod. It’s also conveniently landscape oriented, a blessing for the fat-fingered such as myself.

The real coolness of Zemote is the media screen, which by default controls the majority of Media Center’s functions. The Home button launches MC, volume, fast-forward, and skip all do as expected, and the Back button, navigation pad, and scroll bar are perfection. Really everything I want to do in Media Center is contained on that one screen. Occasionally I swap to the keyboard or trackpad to reposition windows of do other activities outside Media Center, such as web browsing, but really the vast majority of my media PC experience is handled by Zemotes’ simple and smart media controller.

My only issues with Zemote are mouse control and configurability. The trackpad is very slow, typically requiring two to three thumb repositionings to move the cursor across the screen. The accelerometer movement is equally pokey. You have to hold the button and tilt the iPod and hold while the cursor jerks lazily across the monitor. Luckily those flaws don’t kill the app, since most of the time one probably won’t be using the mouse control, but rather the much better thought out media screen.

Some time ago, while it was still beta software, I tried the Mobile Air Mouse ($5.99) app. It was one of the first apps to tap into the iPod’s accelerometer and touchscreen as a PC mouse control surrogate. At the time it was a quirky and novel concept, fun to toy around with, but ultimately just too ahead of it’s time to get much use. However, the app has been in aggressive development, and now in it’s 1.5+ iteration is massively improved.

Basic functions and interface are the same as Zemote, though immediately the commercial polish of Air Mouse is apparent (and to be fair, the app had this going for it from the get-go. It always looked super slick). Air Mouse’s trackpad screen is conveniently coupled with other controls, so one can pause and skip tracks, web browse, and keyboard input without abandoning the trackpad. A cool underrepresented feature is that by simply shaking the iPod downwards, or rotating it to landscape view, the keyboard or control buttons slide out of sight leaving the whole touchscreen available for trackpad control. Shake the iPod upwards, or rotate it back to portrait view, to bring back the hidden controls.

 

Air Mouse includes a web browsing screen with dedicated controls for typical browser activities. I don’t find this a huge advantage as I try to do as little browsing as possible on the awkward tv screen, but others could find a lot of convenience in this feature. The keyboard is also present, though it lacks the comfortable landscape view.

The function screen stands out as the most different. This screen activates function keys which typically correspond to many media controls, and also grants four customizable hotkey for application launching or keyboard shortcut replication. Also here are arrows keys which compare to the directional pad on Zemote’s media screen.

What’s unfortunate about Air Mouse is that it doesn’t come out-of-the-box ready for PC control. It’s hotkeys must be manually configured for each application is is to control. It comes with hotkeys pre-programmed for iTunes and Windows Media Player, but I had to program Media Center myself, which was only a chore because not all the default controls correspond to MC controls, so it took some trial and error. Also no single Air Mouse screen combines all the features I need in one place. I need the arrows keys for file selection and menus navigation, but the play, skip, and pause control are on another screen, so within Media Center I need to swap screens depending upon what I’m doing. Zemote puts it all on one screen. A minor inconvenience, but it does force me to interact with the remote rather than just being able to memorize buttons and control my media without thinking, as one should be able to do with a good remote.

As is the nature of iPod network apps, they communicate via wi-fi, not IR, RF, or Bluetooth. So of course one needs a home wi-fi network set up to make use of these apps, but that’s no big deal these days (a good wireless broadband router, useful even if one has only a single computer, can be had very cheap like my $40 Netgear). Another excellent uncelebrated feature of both these apps is that they leverage Apple’s Bonjour network service for zero-configuration networking. Install the app on your iPod, install it on your PC (already installed automatically with iTunes), and when both are running the automatically find each other on your network with no effort from you. Doesn’t sound like a big deal, but spend some time toying around with your router and firewall port forwarding and pinning down dynamic local IP addresses and you’ll come to value the simplicity as I have.

Now given my criticisms one might think I lean toward Zemote, but in fact the opposite is true; I completely embrace Air Mouse as the best iPod remote app. It certainly looks better, but the real reason is the touchscreen and accelerometer control. They are fantastic. I can zip the cursor across my 42” screen with a simple thumb slide, yet have perfect fine control to move pixel by pixel. And the accelerometer control, which is Zemote’s biggest weakness, is Air Mouse’s forte. The cursor moves realtime with your movements of the iPod. A quick flick spend the cursor flying, and subtle twist moves it smoothly and slowly, but always in exact lockstep with the speed of your own movements. With Zemote a twist to the right set the cursor moving toward the right at a fixed pace, no matter how fervent the iPod motion. You simply have to hold the iPod at it’s angle to maintain the cursor motion until it reaches it’s destination. Air Mouse is tenfold more natural and accurate and come s close to true synergistic perfection in motion control. Additionally, if you don’t like the default sensitivity, you can increase or decrease it for both accelerometer and touchscreen control, which  you can’t with Zemote.

If you have a Nintendo Wii you know something about cool motion-to-cursor control via hand-held accelerometers, and have certainly marveled at the Wii’s fine control. Air Mouse is even better. Whether the credit is due Air Mouse’s software engineers or Apple’s accelerometer engineers I don’t know, but Mobile Air Mouse is the PC and media remote app of choice for me.