#FF00AA

I bought this because I live in a tiny room, my bed is half a dozen feet away from my desk, and yet I can’t spend my time lying on the bed and controlling my computers from there, because there’s no Remote Desktop client for the iPhone, VNC sucks on the Mac, and Bluetooth peripherals are too expensive.

I’m not going to spend a lot of time over the app itself, you can check out their description — the interface is pretty, and works mostly well (except for anything that uses the accelerometer, as always), but… it’s incompatible with OS X’s zoom-in feature.

Chances are you don’t even know that you can zoom into the screen on any Mac (I think it’s since Tiger?); many people don’t. But, if you activate the right settings in the Universal Access preference pane, you can zoom in at any time, by Ctrl-scrollwheeling with your mouse (or Ctrl-two-finger-swiping on a trackpad, or using a bunch of customizable keyboard shortcuts). That was great for zooming into text or images or videos before Safari had full-page zoom, and it’d still be awesome for controlling my iMac from ten feet away — being able to read what’s in my Adium chat window and all.

But, like I said, Mobile Air Mouse isn’t compatible with it: first, you have to change OS X’s setting for how the zoomed area follows the mouse, otherwise the pointer just goes out of the screen; second, even after you’ve done that, clicks don’t register where the pointer is — depending on which area of the screen is zoomed in, clicks will happen closer or farther from where the pointer appears to be.

I contacted technical support (who, to their credit, replied within 24 hours), and they told me they were aware of the problem and couldn’t find a way to fix it. What’s worse, Teleport (which is essentially the same thing, only from Mac to Mac) works perfectly fine with Universal Access zoom, so it makes me wonder how inelegantly Air Mouse Server might be programmed. (It doesn’t seem to be too stable, either.)

As it stands, this application is useless in pretty much all cases, unless you have a Mac mini hooked up to a big-ass 720p television (and not a 1080p, because then you’d be back to pixels being too small for you to control the Mac from your sofa). Or unless you’re using another media player than iTunes (on your PC or Mac), in which case you can’t use Apple’s iTunes Remote and need Air Mouse’s integrated iTunes shortcuts.

As for me: uninstalled. Guess I’ll still be waiting for Apple to release a Bluetooth keyboard with integrated trackpad. (And how much of a fucking no-brainer is that? If only Steve Jobs was — ever, like, once in his lifetime — a couch potato.)