I hope we dont have to pay again for iPad-native Jaadu
Its worth every penny, but itd a pricey app in relative terms.
The existing app, doubled, would only be 960x640, which wastes a lot of the iPods screen. Id love to have the full screen. (As for file-sharingall the better!)
You are right. I never used VNC on iPhone but I can hardly see it to be useful. How do you use touch interface for accessing applications that were not developed for this interface in a first place? You would obviously be much better of with netbook or even a touch-screen device with resistive screen (and stylus).
Actually, Jaadu is excellentas good as a mousejust too small on iPhone
But with pinch zooming, and 3-finger-tap to quickly view all or zoom in, the small screen is surprisingly effective.
The reason it works well is that it doesnt use direct touch like the rest of the iPhone (although you can set it that way if you wish). Thats not precise, given the size of a finger tip. Instead, your whole phone acts as a trackpad like a laptop. You dont touch where you want to clickin fact it doesnt matter where you touch. Touch anywhere you want that keeps your finger out of the way of what youre viewing.
Its a very nice, responsive trackpad (I dont think the speed is adjustable but I like the default, and it varies nicely with zoom level). The default momentum option is annoying, but I turn that off.
Clicking is just like a Mac trackpad: single tap to click, tap-drag to drag, two-finger tap for right, click, and two finger swipe up-down for scroll wheel. Its a complete two-button scrollmouse.
Modifier keys (command, ctrl, alt/option, shift) appear at the top and can be locked on if needed, so they work with keyboard and mouse alike. (You can even Shift-click.) And in addition to the regular iPhone keyboard at the bottom, you have several others to choose from: a numpad, Fkeys, even one for media control with big arrrow keys.
For typing you have two modes: one uses the iPhones auto-correction (nice!) but doesnt send the text until you submit. The other types directly and immediately on the remote system. Your choice. On the iPad, auto-correction wouldnt be as important anyway.
You can hide and show all these controls with a 3-finger swipe up or down, and you can work in portrait (fit the full screen above the keyboard) or landscape.
So interacting is ALMOST as easy as on a real Mac. It just that the screen is small, and the connection is SLOW if youre connecting remotely. (No avoiding that.) If youre on the same WiFi network as the Mac, though, its really. I use Jaadu sitting on my desk beside the Mac like its a mouse sometimesits that fast. (The screen view may lag a little but the mouse stays fast, when I look at the Macs own screen. You can turn off the screen view on the phone to save power. Thats good: VNC really burns battery!)
Also, theres no audio.
Hows Jaadu VNC on the iPhone? I've used a VNC app (don't remember which one) and it was painfully slow to the point where it was generally unusable. Just the idea with a fully functioning app could be breakthrough.
Dont expect miracles, Im afraid. VNC is a super-sharp, super detailed video stream of sorts, and thats never going to be fast without a ton of a available bandwidth. You have to learn to slow down, and then its usefulVERY useful in emergencies when Im away from my Mac and I need it. But its never the ideal compared to having a real Mac.
In my experience:
* At home on my own WiFi its very fast: cursor responds instantly on the real Mac screen. On the iPhone screen, small actions (typing, menus) are near-instant but big ones (dragging full-screen windows, Exposé) lag maybe half a second.
* On WiFi somewhere else, its OK not greatmore lag, but certainly still usable. I could get real work done that way, especially programming or writing, because those things respond fast. (The more that changes on-screen, the greater the lag. Typing means very slight changes to the image.)
* On 3G (or worse yet, Edge!) its REALLY slow. But I still CAN get something done, if I grit my teeth and bear it, and thats light years better than telling a client I cant look up his password because Im out of the office. I even used EDGE with half a signal to get on my iMac for an urgent matter once. It was pretty awful, but it got the job done!
Note that you can speed up Jaadu a lot by setting the remote Mac/PC to a lower screen res. So I made an AppleScript in my dock that drops my iMac screen res from 1920x1200 down to 1280x800 (and also pauses Folding@Home) and then returns to normal when I quit it. I hit that first-thing when I connect, and then I have to re-connect (necessary when you change users or change res) but its somewhat faster.
I think with the Mac set to the iPads 1024x768 (or even 1280x960), in a WiFi hotspot, it would be pretty usable for some things. (And in some ways, blindingly fast to beat any notebook: the screen may react slowly, but PROCESSING tasks are still running on all those fast desktop cores!)
I made myself a life-size mock-up image of OS X running at 1024x768 on an iPad to scale. It looked great! Then I tried 1280x960, scaled down, and that was good too.
