and there are lots of them, for everything from Front Row on the Mac to Windows Media Center on Windows XP MCE, Vista, and 7, to interfaces for home automation and entertainment systems.
Also, the trackpad thing is far from new. Some of the first apps made for iPhone and iPod Touch were trackpads with full support of every gesture you could make on a multi-touch track pad
Standing the “there’s an app for that” philosophy on its head, developers now offer programs that can turn an iPhone or iPod Touch into a peripheral for a Mac or PC.
Asian developer Headnix offers two such programs: Numbric and Finger, which provide numeric keyboard and Chinese text entry, respectively. The recently updated Numbric costs $1.99 and provides a numeric keypad for an Asian-data-entry-challenged notebook.
We built Numbric with a unique set of features to meet user’s data input need:
* Numeric key pad - standard numeric key pad
* Symbol key pad - enter common symbol with ease
* Configurable zero key - optional double/triple zero key
* Gorgeous night mode - eye-comfy mode for use in dark condition
* Landscape orientation - wider key, more finger space
Finger tuns the iPhone/Touch into a writing “tablet” for Chinese characters. It supports Chinese and Japanese input methods, according to Headnix.
Of course, Mac OS X Snow Leopard provides its own built-in Chinese input with a MacBook/MBP that supports multitouch. Still, there are many Mac notebooks that don’t have the necessary multi-touch trackpad, so Finger is a useful and inexpensive option ($1.99). As the author suggests, it has its own user experience:
Finger provides a different user experience! You can hold the iPhone or iPod Touch in your palm or put it anywhere while you write. This definitely provides you a more flexible input experience.
In Finger v.1.1, we added the following unique features:
•User Dictionary – user’s own associated word dictionary
•Chinese Character Conversion – real-time Chinese character conversion as you type (from Traditional to Simplified and vice versa)
•Enable/Disable Auto-lock – you can keep your iPhone on without entering sleep mode
•Landscape mode support
Logitech’s free Touch Mouse Server lets an iPhone/Touch control a computer as one would with a mouse. It connects via Wifi and offers 3 “mouse” buttons and a trackpad area in the app. The company pitches it to control a Mac or PC connected to a television, but it can used for other purposes, such as presentations or classroom use.
EA’s Tile Rack app is another interesting use of the iPhone/Touch. The free app uses Bluetooth to connect to an iPad running Scrabble for iPad. Players can then use their iPhone/Touch as a tile holder and virtually move tiles onto the iPad’s board.
Do you know of other transformational apps to these? Please let me know. And yes, I recognize that there are a growing number of VNC apps for the iPhone/Touch, but that’s a whole other market by my reckoning.
