Remote Buddy
Sat, 2007.06.16 - 20:15 — müzso
A number of Macs are shipped with an Apple Remote, a small and shiny little infrared remote controller. By default it's rather useless since you can control only a handful of applications with it using Apple's Front Row. However if you take a look at its Wikipedia page, you'll see that there're a number of third party utilities that can extend the abilities of the AR almost unlimited. You can control every aspect of your Mac with some work (if you wanted), but the utilities already contain a lot of presets for a large number of applications by default. I've tested Mira and Remote Buddy so far, but I'm so much satisfied with the latter that I gave up looking any further. 
Mira is quite simple (or at least I didn't find it powerful enough) and lacks presets for some apps that I regularly use. On the other hand Remote Buddy is fully customizable in every way I could think of and you can take control of it step by step (it has a very user-friendly learning curve). Its use is pretty much intuitive: after install it has very usable defaults and knew all my apps (Xee, VLC, NeoOffice, DVD Player) out of the box. Only my TV viewer (MigliaTV) was missing, but thanks to Remote Buddy I could set it up in a couple of minutes. The applications are contolled through so called "behaviours", which are actually rulesets defining the context menu and the button bindings of AR for a given application. Remote Buddy can automatically check the developer's site for behaviour updates, but you can also make your own settings pretty easily. There're different levels of customization: you can create simple actions by telling Remote Buddy which keyboard shortcuts to send to the application to trigger a specific effect (and you've here a number of advanced options too), or you can write your own "plugin" to create deep level binding between Remote Buddy and a specific app. They provide an SDK for free, so you don't have to buy any special license to develop for Remote Buddy.
To tell the truth, I'm quite much amazed by how good this works. I've been playing around with my remote for an hour now ... checking all apps, etc. The AR is especially good to have since I got the 30" Cinema Display. It's too large to watch from a very short instance, so the AR comes very handy if we're watching movies or photos.
I'd give Remote Buddy 9 out of 10 points if I had to give it a score. Finally an app that is worth buying. 
Mira is quite simple (or at least I didn't find it powerful enough) and lacks presets for some apps that I regularly use. On the other hand Remote Buddy is fully customizable in every way I could think of and you can take control of it step by step (it has a very user-friendly learning curve). Its use is pretty much intuitive: after install it has very usable defaults and knew all my apps (Xee, VLC, NeoOffice, DVD Player) out of the box. Only my TV viewer (MigliaTV) was missing, but thanks to Remote Buddy I could set it up in a couple of minutes. The applications are contolled through so called "behaviours", which are actually rulesets defining the context menu and the button bindings of AR for a given application. Remote Buddy can automatically check the developer's site for behaviour updates, but you can also make your own settings pretty easily. There're different levels of customization: you can create simple actions by telling Remote Buddy which keyboard shortcuts to send to the application to trigger a specific effect (and you've here a number of advanced options too), or you can write your own "plugin" to create deep level binding between Remote Buddy and a specific app. They provide an SDK for free, so you don't have to buy any special license to develop for Remote Buddy.
To tell the truth, I'm quite much amazed by how good this works.
I've been playing around with my remote for an hour now ... checking all apps, etc. The AR is especially good to have since I got the 30" Cinema Display. It's too large to watch from a very short instance, so the AR comes very handy if we're watching movies or photos. I'd give Remote Buddy 9 out of 10 points if I had to give it a score.
Finally an app that is worth buying.
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Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 License. My posts reflect my personal opinion and shall not be associated with any of my employers.
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