Remote HD

Gesture Pad on iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch

Controlling your computer without looking at the touch screen is finally possible! The Gesture Pad supports swipes for navigation, tap for selection and two-finger tap for menu operation, two-finger swipes for transport operations (i.e. previous, play/pause or next when controlling iTunes or back, refresh or forward when controlling a web browser).

Trackpad Enhancements

The trackpad now supports zoom by pinching (if enabled on the Mac from System Preferences > Universal Access > Zoom) and tap tap drag gestures to enable dragging. The new trackpad also supports standard three and four finger swipe gestures to navigate, switch applications and support exposé.

AirPlay Support

Stream audio from your Mac to your iOS device and then on to an AirPlay compatible device, such as the new Apple TV, even if your Mac is located across the internet.

Remote Control Support

Control playback on your remote computer using the remote control buttons on your headphones or a remote control paired with a universal dock.

Remote View & Push Notifications

New push notification services notify you on your iOS device if someone has logged on to your machine(s) while you were away. If you have enabled access over the internet, these notifications will also allow you to instantly connect to your computer over the internet and monitor all activity.

Retina Display Optimized Graphics

Every image and button featured in Remote HD is now retina display optimized. Even the Remote View fully supports the spectacular new retina display.

Fast User-switching Support

Remote Helper on your Mac now lets you access your computer even if some other user has taken over your computer. You can use Remote HD to switch back to your account.

Orientation Lock

You can now enable this setting to lock Remote HD's orientation in the middle of your session, a very useful feature when giving a presentation using Remote HD.

Multi-tasking support

Stream audio from your computer while Remote HD is running in the background. In this mode, you can even use a remote attached to your iOS device to control the playback on your computer.

Remote View - your desktop in your device LIVE

One of Remote HD's most amazing features is its streamlined Remote view. Tap on the monitor button located at the top-right side of the remote to bring your LIVE desktop into view, complete with pinching, zooming, left and right-clicks, drag and drop, 3-finger window scrolling and easy access to the keyboard.

Remote HD will deliver a constant stream of screen data to your iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch in order to show you exactly what's happening on the remote computer while you're controlling it. You'll be pleasantly surprised by the response time and refresh rate - it beats most regular desktop VNC programs!

Remote View - it's our signature feature, and we guarantee that it will revolutionize the way you use your computer!

Sending Mouse Clicks - tap to click, secondary tap to right click

Tapping anywhere in the Remote View will send a regular mouse-click, so you can operate quickly when you're zoomed in and have a clear view of what you're clicking on. You can also double tap to send double clicks. To send right-clicks, touch the screen with one finger and tap with a second finger.

Drag & Drop - tap and hold to drag

Drag and drop is a very convenient feature of Remote HD's Remote View. It allows you to drag and drop files, move windows, highlight text and more.

To drag and drop a file:

1. Start by zooming into the Remote View so that you can clearly see the file and easily tap on it.
2. To start dragging, touch and hold the file for half a second. Be careful not to slide your finger.
3. This will make the file stick to your finger. Now moving your finger around will drag the file.
4. Letting go of the touchpad will drop the file.

Scrolling Windows - 3 fingers to scroll

To scroll windows: touch the screen with three fingers, one at a time and without sliding any of your fingers. Now sliding all your fingers up and down will allow your to scroll windows on your computer.

"Apple-style" Remote Control

Remote HD's very first feature was an Apple-style remote control that offered the usual set of buttons found on the Apple-remote: up, down, left, right and OK along with the Menu-button. These will work as expected and in fact, they mimic the functionality of the actual Apple Remote.

But we felt a couple of things were missing, so here's what we added: a full-screen button handy for lots of applications (presentations, visualizations and full-screen), a convenient volume slider and the Application Switcher is always just one tap away. You'll also see a strip of transport controls that change dynamically depending on the application in use (be it a browser, music player, video player, presentation application or TV). This prevents cluttering the interface with buttons that are irrelevant to what you're actively controlling.

Record it!

In order to make Remote HD completely compatible with applications that record streaming video, audio or live TV, a record button has been added as part of the remote control's interface. The record button will automatically appear when you use Remote HD with a program that has recording capabilities.

Help is on the way!

Since Remote HD's interface for remote controlling programs is so versatile and dynamic, we realized that button hints would be helpful. If you ever need help with knowing what the buttons do, one tap on the Information-icon will label every button with its respective function for the program in use.

Volume Control

Volume control is available in several different formats throughout Remote HD, since it's such an important part of controlling your media playback. You will often notice an actual slider that accurately represents the current volume setting on your computer. In other places, you can use the regular hard buttons on your device to turn the volume up and down, either for your device (if streaming audio) or for the computer itself. When starting a movie or music, you can also put your device away without disconnecting. It will go to sleep (the display turns off), but you'll still be able to use the hard buttons to control the computer volume without unlocking it.

Extended Keyboard

Remote HD provides a heavily modded wireless keyboard for remote access that includes arrow keys, tab button, volume buttons and multimedia keys. All of the international keyboard layouts available in your iPad / iPhone / iPod Touch are also supported.

Auto-discover computers outside your network

The auto-discovery of available connections is a super feature within Remote HD's connection management. You will automatically see a list of computers located outside your WiFi-network that you will be able to connect to over the internet - even if they have dynamic IP-numbers that change daily!

In order to discover a computer over the internet, it must first be running Remote Helper and have the "Enable discovery over the internet" and "Automatically configure port forwarding" options selected. You must also have successfully connected to the computer at least once.

Connections Management

Remote HD is intended to be your one-stop-shop for remotely accessing and controlling your computer. Now you'll be able to manage your available connections, have Remote HD discover available connections over the internet; and create (or copy) connection information to store in a list of manual connections.

Power Options: log off, sleep, restart or shut down

Remote HD allows you to log off the active account, put the computer to sleep, restart it or even shut it down altogether. These options come in handy whether you want to conserve energy, protect your privacy or restart your computer after performing system maintenance.

Automatic Wake-on-LAN

Remote HD fully supports Apple's Wake on Demand to wake up your computer. Unlike other remotes, Remote HD won't require you to enter Mac addresses to enable this feature. No wired network required - Wake on Demand even works over WiFi. If you have a MobileMe subscription, you can even wake up your computer over the internet.

To enable Wake on Demand, we recommend reading the Wake on Demand article on Apple's support website

Disturbing the peace with Wake-on-WAN

Wake-on-WAN essentially entails waking up your sleeping computer even when you're using a mobile connection (i.e. you're outside your local network using 3G, EDGE or GPRS). This sounds simple enough but beware: most internet routers will block this feature. If you do have a router that supports this option, or your router is able to run open source firmware like openwrt, ddwrt or something, you will be able to have Remote HD wake your sleeping computer over the internet! Just make sure you configure port forwarding correctly to allow both TCP and UDP traffic on port 32700 from the internet to reach your computer.

Adaptive Bandwidth Usage

Even on your WiFi-network, available bandwidth and connection quality can change. To ensure smooth operation of Remote HD on your iPad / iPhone / iPod Touch, Remote Helper (on the computer) will detect the available bandwidth and make appropriate changes to data quality on the fly. This means reducing image quality while maintaining frame rates and ensuring your refresh rate and response time stays at an acceptable level given any limitations to bandwidth resources. When your connection quality improves, so will the data quality of Remote HD.

Data Conservation Mode on mobile networks

When you connect to your computer using a mobile network (3G, EDGE, GPRS), Remote HD kicks into a mode designed to save data transfer and optimize its performance based on the bandwidth available at any given time. Remote HD ensures proper performance by using text-labels only (instead of text and icons) and saved copies of frequently accessed information (such as applications-lists).

Access Multiple User-accounts on your Mac

If you have multiple accounts on your Mac, our system design lets you install Remote Helper separately for each user account. Multiple instances of Remote Helper can run simultaneously, allowing you to connect to a particular user account. Remote Helper runs in user mode on your computer, meaning that no administrative privileges are required to run it although such privileges may still be needed during initial setup and automatic firewall configuration.

Visual Trackpad

Remote HD features a built-in trackpad.

The visual trackpad supports multi-finger gestures and it has buttons for left, right and center click (tapping the trackpad itself also works). Your fingers will leave glowing, fading traces of their motion, and the Application Switcher is only one tap away. To ensure proper performance (even on older devices), you can play with the Settings-panel to decide how the trackpad works best on your device.

The trackpad now also supports sending right-clicks and drag-n-drop. To right-click, touch anywhere on the trackpad surface and tap with a secondary finger. To drag things, touch anywhere on the trackpad surface and hold your finger steady for half a second. This will enable dragging.

Application Switcher: switch and close running programs

Switch between or close running programs without any pointing around. Tapping the name of the current application brings up the Application Switcher, and it shows you a list of running programs (much like when you cmd-tab on your Mac, with large icons and clear text labels). Scroll and tap to focus on any running program, and you can close a running program by tapping the 'x' beside each icon.

Spotlight Integration

Searching for files on your computer has never been this easy! It's integrated right into Remote HD. There's no clicking around to get to it. Just type in your search term and tap to launch files directly from your search results. You won't find this feature in any other iPad / iPhone / iPod Touch application.

Launch any program

In Remote HD, every application is accessible with one click or tap. By looking for programs installed on your computer in the Applications library, Remote HD will spare you the drudgery of digging through folder upon folder. You'll simply get a list of all the programs Remote HD finds on your computer. Just tap to run.

Complete redesign of the user interface

The user interface of Remote HD is now remarkably sleek with smooth animations, pixel-perfect icons and cool transitions.

VoiceOver

We want Remote HD to be an application anyone can use, so it was redesigned with VoiceOver in mind. Every interface element contains correct accessibility labels, and dynamic buttons change their accesibility labels accordingly. Any changes in the button layouts caused by switching applications are automatically announced to the user.

In-application Settings

All the settings for Remote HD are accessible from within the application instead of the Settings-panel in your device. This allows you to change every setting without interrupting your workflow or disconnecting the current session.

Auto-Connect

If you primarily use Remote HD to connect to the same computer, turn on Auto-connect in the application's Settings panel. This will cause Remote HD to automatically connect to the most recently accessed computer without having to search or choose from available connections.

Have it your way: expanding and customizing Remote HD

Now you will be able to take complete control of how your computer handles commands from Remote HD. This means you can control any application, just the way you'd want to! The interface at your disposal will be that of the "Apple-style" remote (in portrait mode) but even turning on the overlaid controls in Remote View will get your commands executed.

Here's how you go about customizing your very own controls: on a Mac, install and run Griffin Proxi along with Remote Helper. Now, if you press a button on the remote control and Remote HD doesn't know what to do (i.e. it doesn't know any particular commands for the running application), it will check to see if Proxi is running in the background. Upon finding Proxi, Remote HD will pass on the information about the button click and that's where you can take control and have Proxi do almost anything you want!

Example of a Remote HD trigger in Proxi:

    Create a new AppleScript trigger using Insert Trigger > AppleScript
    AppleScript trigger name: RJ-UP
    Filter: Trigger if any, Value is 0
                        

Assign a task like KeyPress > Volume up to this trigger. Next, focus on an unsupported application and press the Up key in Remote HD. It should trigger Volume up.

Valid event names: RJ-UP, RJ-DOWN, RJ-LEFT, RJ-RIGHT, RJ-PLAY, RJ-MENU, RJ-FULLSCREEN, RJ-PLAYBACK, RJ-PREV, RJ-NEXT, RJ-VOLUME
Valid values: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4 for events Up, Down, Hold, DoubleTap, Hold Release