Introducing Remote Buddy Express — now available on the Mac App Store

September 8, 2011 - Filed in Press Release by Felix

We're proud to announce the immediate availability of Remote Buddy Express on the Mac App Store.

Remote Buddy Express is the Express version of the most powerful remote control solution for the Mac®. It gives its users full control over their Mac® via their Apple® Remote, iPhone® or iPod™ Touch. With more than 100 directly supported applications and system functions, real virtual mouse and keyboard, built-in presentation tools and extensive configuration abilities, Remote Buddy Express is the perfect match for presenters, home theater PC (HTPC) power users and everybody else looking to control their applications and their Mac® via the aforementioned devices.

Remote Buddy Express Key Features

• control 100+ applications on your Mac®
• Virtual Mouse and Keyboard
• Mousespot: highlight important parts of your presentation
• one central menu (incl. for switching between apps)
• File Browser: browse your filesystem and recently used files, open documents
• integrated media library access (incl. EyeTV, iTunes®, VIDEO_TS folders, ..)
• easily configurable button mapping and on-screen menu structure
• sleep, shutdown, reboot your computer
• control many important system settings
• button mapping charts: integrated in the menu, so you don't have to memorize them
• best support for popular media players software

AJAX Remote Key Features

Remote Buddy Express includes AJAX Remote, a dynamic web 2.0 application for controlling your Mac® with your iPhone™, iPod® Touch. Its key features:

• gesture remote control
• presenter trackpad
• keyboard
• live webcam view
• iTunes® control and library streaming
• EyeTV control

For more information, please see the AJAX Remote section of the Remote Buddy Express product page.

Supported Applications

Out of the box, Remote Buddy Express can control the following applications:

Adobe® Acrobat, Adobe® Bridge, Adobe® Media Player, Adobe® Reader, Adobe® Lightroom™, AirFoil, Aperture™, AOL® Radio, Audio Hijack, Awaken, Boxee, Capture One®, DivX Player, DVD Player, Expression Media, EyeTV, Front Row, GarageBand™, Google™ Earth, Hulu Desktop, iPhoto™, iTunes®, Keynote®, MPlayer OSX Extended, NeoOffice® Impress, OpenOffice.org Impress, PhotoBooth, Plex, PowerPoint®, Preview, QuickTime® Player 7, QuickTime® Player X, Spotify, VLC media player, XBMC.

Support for additional applications can be added using the included Behaviour Construction Kit.

Please note: Above list is just an excerpt. Please see the Remote Buddy Express website for the full list and details (including version numbers).

Supported Hardware

Remote Buddy Express supports the use of the following hardware to remote control your Mac®:

• built-in Apple® IR Receiver with Apple® Remote control
• iPhone™ or iPod® Touch, connected via WiFi (on the same subnet, without packet drops, clients must be able to make connections to other clients)

System Requirements

A Mac® running Mac OS X 10.6.6 or later. Remote Buddy is compatible with OS X® Snow Leopard and OS X® Lion.

What's the difference between Remote Buddy and Remote Buddy Express?

In an nutshell, Remote Buddy Express is a version of Remote Buddy with stripped down hardware support, offered at a lower price point. While the Express version supports only the Apple® Remote (via built-in Apple® IR Receivers), iPhone® and iPod™ touch (please see "Supported Hardware" for technical requirements), the regular Remote Buddy version supports a much, much wider range of remote controls and receivers. For all differences between the two, please see the comparison table we've put together for you.

More information

For more information, please see the Remote Buddy Express product page.

Media

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Coming soon..

August 16, 2011 - Filed in Inside the company by Felix

I just finished this logo - and am thrilled with it as much as I am with the application I designed it for. Stay tuned!

Summer Sale

August 3, 2011 - Filed in Status updates, Press Release by Felix

Due to the highly positive reception, we're extending the roaring 5 year 20% promo throughout August.

It'll now end on September 1st, 2011. If you or your friends haven't gotten a Remote Buddy yet, don't miss this crazy deal.

[Update 2011/09/02: The sale has ended.]

Waking the sleeping Lion: Remote Buddy 1.18.1

July 28, 2011 - Filed in Status updates, Mac Development by Felix

The sleep and wake behavior of Lion in many respects differs substantially from that of Snow Leopard. Most notably, a sleeping display can no longer be woken up by moving the mouse, an emulated key stroke (via f.ex. VNC) or the Apple® Remote. You now need to press a key on your keyboard or a button on your mouse or trackpad.

These changes make a lot of sense in environments where no remote controls are used: in these, it's now a lot harder to power the display back up by accident. You also usually won't need or want to power up a distant display that you most likely can't see when you access your Mac® via screen sharing software.

For users of remote controls, however, these changes can really be a show stopper. Especially for HTPC users, who may want to save power, but don't want to connect a mouse or keyboard to their Mac® just to wake up their displays.

Naturally, we got a lot of emails on this topic (btw: thanks to everybody for their great feedback!). But with the traditional ways of waking up a sleeping display (generating "system activity", posting mouse and keyboard events, ..) no longer working under Lion, we couldn't offer a solution right away.

So we studied Lion's source code to get the complete picture. What we learned pretty fast is that the change in behavior (as described in the first paragraph) is not a bug. In fact, several comments in Lion's source code strongly suggest this is a feature. This also makes sense to some extent (as described in the second paragraph).

By now, we've found three ways to wake sleeping displays from an application: one using private API and requiring root privileges, one using public API and requiring a kernel extension - and, after reading through a lot of kernel source code - one using only public API and requiring neither root privileges nor a kernel extension.

Naturally, we picked the third one for inclusion in Remote Buddy. The new version 1.18.1 now wakes sleeping displays whenever you press a button on your remote. It also addresses other Lion-specific issues that you've reported to us.

Enjoy!

P.S.: The 5 year celebration promo is still running, but will end in only 3 days. Don't miss this opportunity to save 20% - and don't forget to tell your Mac®-owning friends! Thanks!