Salling Clicker - Use handheld devices as Mac remotes

Sep 16, '04 11:28:00AM

Contributed by: robg

Salling Clicker The macosxhints Rating:
10 of 10
[Score: 10 out of 10]

This week's Pick of the Week is somewhat delayed, due to my travels this week. It's also directly related to what I did this week, so I don't feel too badly about the delay. On Tuesday and Wednesday, I gave a "Living with OS X" presentation to a couple of Oregon Mac user groups. The presentation was made in Keynote, and I was looking for a good way to control it remotely so that I could move about the room a bit. At the suggestion of a friend, I tried out Salling Clicker, which I had last looked at shortly after it had come out. Needless to say, much had changed in the year or so since I last looked at it -- and changed in a very good way. Read on for some details on just what you can do with Salling Clicker and a compatible Bluetooth device.

Note: Due to the late finish in Eugene, followed by the 100+ mile drive home, this is today's only hint. Late night arrivals and early morning starts don't seem to work very well for me!

Salling Clicker is a combination of a system extension and a package that gets installed on certain Bluetooth-capable handheld devices. It works with a number of phones and certain Bluetooth-enabled Palm Pilots, with varying features on each. My Palm (Tungsten T) has Bluetooth, so it looked like I was set. Salling Clicker then turns those devices into powerful remote control units for your Mac and certain applications, such as Keynote.

Download and installation couldn't be easier; run a package installer on your Mac to install the preferences panel and a background monitoring app, then install an application on your phone or Palm. Assuming you've previously paired your devices, running the app on the handheld will quickly initiate a connection with your Mac, and that's about all it takes. When I first tried to run it, though, I had an error on my Palm that read "Error: Invalid service record handle." After some digging, I found the cause was SUB -- as in Stupid User Behavior. I had installed the pref panel on OS X, but hadn't actually launched it, hence Salling wasn't running on my Mac! Once I opened the prefs panel, everything worked as expected. Unfortunately, my little screw-up meant I only had the chance to test Salling Clicker in Eugene, not Corvallis.

Once Salling has connected the two devices, you now have a very powerful remote control unit in your hands. I can't speak for the phone functionality (which looks very cool), but as a Bluetooth remote, it worked amazingly well. It comes with a number of predefined control scripts, including iTunes, PowerPoint, Keynote, various media devices such as DVD players, SlimServer, EyeTV, etc., Mail.app, iPhoto, and a few System utilities. You pick a "controller" to use, and that activates a set of commands. For instance, in the iTunes Remote mode, the Palm displays the current track and a list of upcoming tracks. A set of onscreen buttons, along with the physical buttons on the Palm, can then be used to send iTunes commands to your Mac. You can play, pause, skip, resume, etc.

In my case, the Keynote mode is basic but functional (due mainly to Keynote's limited AppleScriptability, I believe). If you're a PowerPoint user, especially the 2004 version, you get even more features -- you'll see the name of the current and upcoming slides on the display, along with your speaker's notes.

I was able to remotely start the presentation, black out the screen, and move forward/back through the presentation, all with great range provided by the Bluetooth connection. While testing before the presentation, I was able to use the Palm from about 50' away from the PowerBook, which was quite impressive. During the actual presentation, Salling Clicker and the Palm worked flawlessly, allowing me to move about the floor a bit while talking. If you do a lot of presentations, I highly recommend Salling Clicker -- or something similar to free you from the physical location of the machine.

The other modes in Salling Clicker are also very well done, though I don't have quite as much real-world need for them. Reading Mail, viewing iPhoto albums, and controlling your mouse via the Palm's screen and stylus are all amazingly cool tech demos ... and since you can write your own AppleScripts to integrate with Salling Clicker, the possibilities are endless. Clicker has a "30 click" free trial mode, but if you want more than that, you'll have to pay the $19.95 registration fee.

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