So here’s another one of those ‘wow factor’ iPhone apps. Do It is like the ‘Remote’ app that lets you remote control iTunes on your Mac via the iPhone – except it lets you remote control lots of apps.
The App Store description says it supports 18 apps – I’m only seeing 10 in the app right now, but that may be due to my Mac setup or similar.
I’ve been playing with Do It for a little while today. It’s very buggy and in need of some updates love, but I’m still liking it a whole lot, and saying wow. Honestly, just the Last.fm remote had me sold – but using it for Front Row (which I’d never really touched before now, how did I miss that?), iTunes, iPhoto, and Photo Booth is just very, very cool in my book.
Here’s some very quick examples of what you can remote control on a Mac with Do It:
Last.fm – go to Keyboard mode and type in an artist name to fire up a new station, pause it, skip tracks, increase and decrease the volume, set the volume to max. My one big wish list item so far is an ability to ‘Love’ an item in Last.fm – that would be superb.
Photo Booth – change between different background effects, snap a photo.
iTunes – play / pause tracks, fast forward within a song and to a next track, switch between content categories (Music, Movies etc.)
The list of supported apps on the Do It App Store page shows this:
You need to install the (free) desktop client for Do It on your Mac – and it needs to be active (open) in order for Do It to work.
Here are some of the various ‘buggy’ things I’ve encountered so far:
It’s not very good at handling moving the ‘focus’ within an app – i.e. where the cursor would be on the desktop. So, for example, in Last.fm if my cursor is not already in the field for entering text to start a new station (on the Mac) then Do It’s keyboard will be useless to me.
Similarly, with iTunes I can use the Up and Down keys to move between content categories (Music, Movies etc), but when I’m on Movies, for example, I can’t move across to the actual movies – so I can’t select one unless I first get the cursor into that area of the screen on the Mac.
If I launch Front Row via Do It, and I already have Last.fm playing, I can’t get the Last.fm track to stop via the remote.
Despite the various buggy bits, this app is still quite impressive. For each application you get an ‘Info’ screen to show which commands are mapped to which buttons / keys. Here’s the screen for Last.fm:
To launch a remote control session with an app, you go to the program selection screen …
There’s also a Cover Flow style view to scroll through the controllable apps, but so far I can’t get it to launch an app from that view.
Do It is a very cool and promising looking app. Definitely needs some updating / bug fixing, but hopefully that will come soon.
Do It is in the App Store now, and costs $3.99. You can find it HERE (App Store link) – as it shows up in a search, and is in the Utilities category, but is quite hard to find even so (more on that later).
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TAGS: IPhone remote control apps
