iPhone Applications (hacks): Gain remote access to your PC or MAC through the iPhone

Want to take control of your home PC or MAC using your iPhone? TightVNC (with some modifications) for the PC (Wintel) and Telekinesis for your MAC seem to be the answer at least for now.

More details and images available after the jump.

More about modified TightVNC for PC

Natetrue apparently frustated by the iPhone's inability to talk to his PC remotely (Wintel), went on to modify TightVNC in such a way that Voila!! you can now remotely access your PC. The cool part is that you can use the iPhone's zooming and panning capabilities to move around your desktop.

Supported actions:

• Clicks: Left, right, middle, double
• Scrolling: Mouse wheel up and down
• Dragging and dropping (click Drag to hold mouse button down, click Drop to release)
• Text entry

How it works (for the tech freaks):

WebVNC is a modification of the VNC server. Where before the HTTP server in VNC would just serve a Java applet, now it serves an AJAX application that downloads the screen as a set of JPEG images. The application then checks back with the server to see which ones have changed, and reloads them. Input is just another message to the server.

The window list is done with Windows-specific functions, enumerating top-level windows and returning a list of their titles and positions. When you click one the VNC server activates the window and the AJAX app limits its window size to just the one window.

More details available here.

Telekinesis for your MAC

The problem with quite a few iPhone Hacks have been that some of them work on the PC or MAC and not both. So in this case it is good to see that there is a solution available for both. Telekinesis provides you a way to remotely access your MAC using an iPhone.

Features as available on their website:

• Stream music and videos from your computer
• Screen capture with mouse click and basic typing support
• Simple iTunes Remote control
• Browse your files
• Run applescript remotely
• iSight image capture
• Basic Spotlight search
• Easily create and add more apps

I thought it was important to also mention some of the warnings provided:

Note: This is still a developer prototype and is intended only as a demo to get people started and don't leave it running if you aren't using it.

Follow this link to get more security considerations and details on usage.

Don't forget to tell us how things went in the comments.

Telekinesis for MAC

[Information & Images courtesy Telekinesis & Cre.ations.net]