Mobile Mouse for iPhone and iPad

Creating content for Ubuntu November seems to be sucking up most of my time at the moment so blog posts on other subjects are going to be a little limited. But, I wanted to quickly write something today about my new favourite iPad app.

As soon as the 5 iPads arrived in school for us to test the first thing we wanted to try and look into was ways to get them connected up to our projectors, and a method of sharing content with a whole class while remaining mobile in the room. We experimented with VNC clients to connect to the classroom laptop, but Mobile Mouse has proved to be by far the best solution for remotely controlling your computer from the iPad.

Install is a two stage process, download an application to the computer you want to control (it runs in the background), and purchase the (less than £2) app from the App Store.

Opening Mobile Mouse you are presented with a large trackpad surface, mouse buttons, and a reproduction of your Dock at the bottom of the screen. Operation is as simple as using the iPad as a big trackpad for your computer. The dock makes launching applications easy, and buttons across the top of the app give you access to iTunes shortcuts & a keyboard.

Working with a web browser is an example of an application that has been enhanced by additional buttons. Opening Chrome I get a new top bar in mobile mouse that contains browser shortcut keys, allowing me to easily open new tabs, search, browse forward/back/etc.

In short- it’s not free (like Mocha VNC) and doesn’t actually show you what is on your laptop screen, but the additional features make this application so much more useable. This is the first app I have really found to be a massive improvement to the current way we teach, and one I would really recommend. Next step is to try the iPhone version.