Found a very useful application for the iPhone this morning: Mocha VNC Lite. It lets you use the VNC protocol to control a computer. VNC is built into Leopard, and is available on Windows and on most flavors of *nix (that are using a GUI).
The application is free, and quite usable. The only hiccups I found were: 1) VNC seems to be a bit of a resource hog on OS X (as seen in the above photo), 2) I couldn’t find a way to scroll a window 3) I couldn’t find a way to move / resize a window.
None the less, it gives full access to the computer and, like I mentioned, it is very usable.
To do something that requires a single click on the computer, you do a double tap (like make a window the front most window, or launch a dock item).
The keyboard works well too. There is a “clover” key and a control key at the top of the screen (as seen above). There are no arrow keys, but the control key lets you do the Emacs bindings to move around in text and do “delete forward char” (ctrl+f, ctrl+b, ctrl+n, ctrl+p, etc etc).
Since this is the lite version I would guess that a more full featured version is on the way. However, Mocha VNC Lite, as it stands, is a very usable application and worth adding to your home screen.
(I’d really like to find an SSH application if you know of one)
This looks cool!
Anyone got a recommendation for a VNC server for a Window 2003 box?
@dickbob I am not sure you’ll be able to use the lite version for a 2003 windows box. The application itunes page says that because it doesn’t have the ctrl+alt+delete buttons you can’t login to the system. However, it lists RealVNC, TightVNC, and UltrVNC as working on Windows.
Okay, to answer my own question I install RealVNC Free Edition without an issue.
But the problem is that Mocha VNC Lite doesn’t support ctrl-alt-del to allow a Windows login and the Paid version, which does, isn’t approved by Apple yet!
Arrrrg!
You can use the Lite version for Windows 2003 using a simple work around. Just stop Windows 2003 from forcing you to use CTRL+ALT+DEL on the machine. You can do this through local policy of the server.
To access group policy enter ‘GpEdit.Msc ‘ from command prompt. In the Group Policy Object Editor navigate to the following:
>Computer Configuration
>>Windows Settings
>>>Security Settings
>>>>Local Policies
>>>>>Security options
Double click on the policy for “Interactive Logon: Do not require CTRL+ALT+DEL” and enable.
You might need a server restart.