Touchpad turns your iPhone into a portable trackpad

Now here’s an application for the iPhone that I can get behind. Jahanzeb Sherwani, a Computer Science PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University, has developed an iPhone app called Touchpad that lets you turn your iPhone’s touchscreen into a proxy pointing device for your Mac or PC. Use it to control your cursor, flick through presentation slides, play music—anything your mouse or trackpad can do, Touchpad can do. Check the link above for a YouTube video showing off all its nifty tricks.

The secret ingredient? Touchpad initiates a VNC connection to your computer, meaning that your iPhone needs to be on the same Wi-Fi network as your computer and your computer needs to be running VNC software. The other catch is that Touchpad is a native app, which means you’ll need to jailbreak your iPhone if you want to give it a whirl. Still, it’s a pretty cool idea, and one that seems to translate naturally between the iPhone’s touchscreen and most modern pointing devices.

[via Engadget]

Category: Software

Posted by Dan Moren on Feb 21 2008, 12:17 PM ET

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