Thursday, February 27, 2003

Clicker coolness I'm in love. For the past couple of days I've been using the Sony Ericsson Clicker application created by Jonas Salling of Salling Shareware. I never imagined that my phone could function as a remote control, but now that I have it, I could never give it up. The best usage, so far, is to control my presentations during my lectures. No klunky software, and I already had the phone, so that's one less gadget to carry around. Now add the fact that I can also control my music software (launch, next track, last track, volume up/down) and it becomes that much better. It is the simplicity of the whole thing that makes it so valuable. It just works. There is a "proximity sensor" feature that keys a script of your choice when you come "in range", and another script when you leave. I had iTunes start playing when I came in the room and pause when I left, but every once in a while the Bluetooth connection gets flaky and when it reconnects, the script is activated, so my music was popping on and off at odd intervals. I have also noticed that keeping the Bluetooth connection active sucks the life out of my t68i faster than with normal usage. If I'm using Clicker off-and-on during the day, the battery is usually at about 60% by evening. I'm anxious to get my new laptop (next month sometime...) that has Bluetooth built in so I don't have to plug in the little USB dongle to 'tooth-ify my current PowerBook. Altogether, though, I am very impressed with this unexpected gem. Does anyone know about similar tools that would work on my Palm? This seems like a natural candidate for a PalmOS-based solution, but I haven't seen anything... 3:21:01 PM    comment []