Give your iPhone the power of telekinesis

No, your iPhone can’t bend spoons or make pieces of paper slide across your desk…but if you install Google’s telekinesis alpha, you will be amazed at the things your iPhone can make a Mac do.

What kinds of things? Stream videos and music, basic remote screen capture with typing support, browse files, open applications on the remote Mac, iSight image capture, run Spotlight searches, and more.

The interface is definitely iPhone-like, and while you’re still (ugh) running a web app, this is one of the nicer-feeling web apps around. It’s also easily extensible—create a web page with certain code, add an icon, and your program (web page, really) will then appear on telekinesis’ home screen.

It’s hard to describe, but easy to use. Just install the alpha (it’s just an application, there are no hidden bits that I can find), launch it, supply a new username and password (this user will have the same rights as your normal user), and then point your iPhone’s browser to the URL of the machine running telekinesis.

I’m not the kind of person who enjoys using web apps at all, but this one is actually decent. Of course, it would be even nicer if it could be a standalone program with its own icon on the iPhone’s screen…hopefully someday!

Category: Software

Posted by Rob Griffiths on Jul 12 2007, 7:37 AM ET

Comments (6)

I agree, it's neat.. at least it was until I played with Remote Buddy 1.1. Now it seems primitive by comparison.

Posted by Winston Baccus | July 12, 2007 8:28 AM

very cool program! the coolest is being able to browse and launch docs that the iPhone can open (doc, xls, jpg, etc). this is excellent for business travelers who forgot to take a copy of that one file...

Posted by John Mims | July 12, 2007 11:11 AM

OMG! This is cool stuff...streaming from my iTunes library to the iPhone as I type this. Remote Buddy? Better check that out too.

Posted by Distorted Loop | July 12, 2007 5:27 PM

Hmmm...Remote Buddy turns your iPhone into a remote control for your Mac, but it doesn't seem to support streaming stuff to the iPhone. Two different products if that's the case.

Posted by Distorted Loop | July 12, 2007 5:38 PM

This seems like a cool program and messing around with it on my computer it seems great. The only problem is there are NO Instructions on how to set the program up. It's not exactly the easiest thing to do from what I can tell. Why don't they at least make a doc or pdf with basic set-up instructions? I'd love to get my iPhone going, but I don't want to spend hours trying to get it to connect and having to configure my whole network just for a little app. Am I alone here?

Posted by bemused | July 12, 2007 11:28 PM

"bemused"

Here are all the instructions you should need.

Posted by Mhewski | July 17, 2007 3:02 AM

Post a comment

Name:

Email Address:

URL:

Remember personal info?

Comments: (you may use HTML tags for style)

ABOUT iPHONE CENTRAL

Get the latest news, reviews, and opinion about Apple's groundbreaking iPhone from the Apple experts at Macworld.

Want more information? Be sure to check out our complete iPhone coverage.

iPHONE VERSION

Our site's pretty iPhone friendly. But if you'd like to test an iPhone-app-like version of our site, click here and give it a go.

MACWORLD'S iPHONE REVIEW

How does the iPhone stack up? Read our in-depth review.

iPHONE QUESTIONS OR COMMENTS?

Send your iPhone thoughts:
via e-mail
via voicemail
and we may use them on the site.