TouchMouse Turns Your iPhone/iTouch Into a WiFi Mouse For Your Mac/PC

TouchMouse is a free application for the iPhone/iPod touch that, when paired with its accompanying control software on your Mac or Windows computer, turns your touchscreen into a mouse and keyboard.

Once you download the software to your iPhone or iPod touch and pair it with the server software—Logitech has versions of the TouchMouse Server software available for Windows XP, Vista, and 7 as well as Mac OS X—you'll be able to use your device as a mouse for controlling your computer.

via TouchMouse Controls Your Computer’s Mouse and Keyboard via iPhone or iPod touch – Remote Control – Lifehacker.

I’m using it right now to write this entry. Did I mention it includes text input too? It does take some getting used to, but I can see that it would make great addition to a teknoids toolkit. Imagine having the server on all of those classroom PCs and an iTouch in the hands of every faculty or presenter.

Dave Winer Wonders If We Should Trust the iPad

The problem is this — if Facebook goes away — and it could, so does everything everyone created with it. Facebook investors and developers like Joe (who I respect enormously) probably aren’t worrying about this, because necessarily everything they do is tied up in the success of Facebook. Now if Joe can show me, in his architecture based on the iPad, where all my work is mirrored in a service I pay for, like Amazon S3, in a simple format I and others can write software against, then I can relax and look forward to the future he, Brent and Miguel want to create. But if my work is tied up in their success, then the price is too high. I’ll take the lower fidelity but open playing field of the netbook, and keep my own data on my own hard drives, and back it up as I see fit. And continue to exercise my First Amendment rights.

via Scripting News.

Dave really wants to keep control over his data, and that is a Good Idea. His fear is that the iPad is just an extension of the Apple Silo that lulls us into storing our in proprietary spaces were it exists at the mercy of large corporations. In a nutshell Dave wants to be able to use HTTP to get data on and off the iPad. That capability provides us with the ability to easily move our data around. And we need that sort of portability for our data.

links for 2010-01-26

  • The featured content module is useful if you have non-technical staff who need to add blocks on the site that contain lists of node titles, node teasers, and/or full node content. This module can also be useful if you need to get up some related/featured content blocks quickly and are not familiar enough with views to do it.
  • integration with wordy.com proofreading service.