iPhone App Review: Remote Control Your iPhone With Your Computer Using Veency

October 21st, 2008 | Comments | Posted in iPhone, iPhone Apps

There’s Mocha VNC for the iPhone to remote control your Mac or PC from your phone. Now, there’s Veency to remote control your iPhone from your Mac or PC. But first, you need to have a jailbroken iPhone to install Veency on your phone.

You can check out my iPhone jailbreaking tutorials in the iPhone category.

iPhone apps can be installed both from the App Store or from the third party applications repository, Cydia and Installer, if you have a jailbroken phone.

Install the free Veency app from Cydia and restart or respring your iPhone. Unlike most apps, Veency will not create an icon on your Springboard. To activate it, you need to have a remote control software on your PC such as Ultra VNC or Tight VNC, or Chicken VNC if you have a Mac. Connect to your iPhone using a Wi-Fi conection.

Use your mouse to control your iPhone from your computer.

  • Click and drag with your mouse to scroll.
  • A single-click is like a single tap.
  • Right-click is like pressing the Home button.

While you can perform almost everything you can do on your iPhone from your Mac or PC such as launching applications, reply to emails, text messages, lock and unlock your phone, etc., you may wonder why you need to do those things on your computer, or conversely, you’d rather do most of the things on your computer such as mail, surf, listen to music, watch video, etc., when you have your Mac or PC. Still, there are useful things you can do with Veency than using your iPhone or computer alone.

Some cool things you can do with Veency:

  • Use your iPhone as a remote video camera and snap pictures using the built-in camera or record in real-time using an app such as Cycorder.
  • Easily type text on your Notes app using your computer’s keyboard.
  • Run apps on your iPhone while charging it across the room.
  • Create demos of your iPhone apps using your computer’s screen recording application.
  • Trick or spy on your wife, husband, children or friends (at your own risk!).


Using your iPhone as a remote video camera.

What you cannot do:

  • Turn your iPhone screen to it’s side or in portrait mode.
  • Use two fingers to zoom in, zoom out or rotate.
  • iPhone audio is not transfered to the computer.
  • Video shows blank screen.

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iPhone App Review: Caissa Chess Versus Chess Classic

October 14th, 2008 | Comments | Posted in iPhone, iPhone Apps


One of the great things about having an iPhone (especially because of its large viewing screen) is that it allows you to do something worthwhile, if not productive, during what would be idle times, such as riding in a bus on a long trip or just sitting alone waiting for someone or something. Instead of counting electric posts or watching people go by, why not whip out your iPhone and read an ebook, watch a movie, or play a game? Since I’m not into computer games, I usually read an ebook. There is one exception however—I like playing chess. The good news is, chess playing computers have come a long way since I discovered a chess program for my desktop computer when IBM XT was cutting edge. Now, even a small chess program for the iPhone can beat anyone of my chess buddies, including me. More »

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Make Your iPhone Apps Run Uninterrupted in the Background

October 8th, 2008 | Comments | Posted in iPhone, iPhone Apps

The iPhone SDK prohibits third-party applications from running in the background. This basically made instant-messaging applications pretty much crippled as it won’t be able to collect messages while you are doing something else. You also cannot listen to radio or streaming music applications like Tuner while surfing the web or sending SMS. More »

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MobileInstallation 2.1 for iPhone 2.1

September 15th, 2008 | Comments | Posted in iPhone, iPhone Apps

If you followed my tutorial “Download and Test iPhone Apps Before Buying From the App Store“, and then upgraded your iPhone to firmware 2.1, then, you need to perform the tutorial again using the patched MobileInstallation 2.1 file.

Download the file here.

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iPhone App Review: Cycorder

August 26th, 2008 | Comments | Posted in iPhone, iPhone Apps

If you’re looking for an application that can turn your iPhone into a video cam, you won’t find any from the Apple App Store yet. But if you have a jailbroken iPhone 2.0, rejoice! Available from Cydia are actually not one but two iPhone video recorders. One is free and the other costs $19.95 with a trial version. So which one is better? Depends on what you want to achieve.

Personally, I prefer the free Cycorder that was developed by Jay Freeman (Saurik), the creator of Cydia; not really because it’s free, but because of the better video quality it produces. The only drawback is, it doesn’t have audio capability. Not bad if you want to produce silent movies. On the other hand, the iPhone Video Recorder has more options, supports audio and compresses video files better but the quality, even at the “Best” option, pales in comparison to Cycorder. More »

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iPhone Apps To Help You Relax and Fall Asleep

August 24th, 2008 | Comments | Posted in iPhone, iPhone Apps

I sometimes have a hard time falling asleep at night even when everything is quiet… maybe too quiet. When counting sheep simply does not work, I find it helpful to listen to an audio book on my iPhone like Paulo Coelho’s “The Alchemist” or Stephen Hawking’s “A Briefer History of Time”. Usually, I’m asleep in about an hour into the story. The problem however is, I usually wake up in the middle of the night with the audio book still playing and I have to turn it off, and that brings me back to where I started—awake. More »

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iPhone App Review: DataCase

August 14th, 2008 | Comments | Posted in iPhone, iPhone Apps

While Caravan (see my review) lets the user use the iPhone or iPod Touch to transfer files to and from a computer, the $6.99 DataCase application lets the user use the computer to transfer files between computer and iPhone.

DataCase supports the Apple File Transfer Protocol (AFP) on the Mac and the web protocol, HTTP, for file browsing and downloading on your computer’s web browser. And, like Caravan, it also supports FTP and Bonjour network connections; but unlike with Caravan, you don’t need to configure FTP on your computer when using DataCase; in fact you don’t need to share your files on you computer at all. Your iPhone becomes both the FTP and HTTP server on which your computer connects to. More »

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iPhone App Review: Caravan - Your Home Folder On the Go

August 12th, 2008 | Comments | Posted in iPhone, iPhone Apps
Caravan App

Caravan App

The $2.99 Caravan application from the AppStore is one of those useful apps that lets you easily transfer files from your computer to your mobile device. Unlike other file transfer apps such as FileMagnet, Files and FTP on The Go, Caravan lets you view or listen to the files in your remote computer directly on your iPhone without saving them first (of course you can also save the files to your iPhone if you wish). While Caravan is a great way to access files on your computer, the lack of a good documentation on how to use it makes it seem more difficult to use than it really is. More »

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Testing NetShare for iPhone Tethering

August 5th, 2008 | Comments | Posted in iPhone, iPhone Apps

Nullriver recently released an application to the App Store that will turn your iPhone 2.0 into a wireless modem. Unfortunately, the $10 application, called NetShare, didn’t stay in the App Store for long. Apple or Nullriver still has to offer an explanation as to why NetShare was going in and out of the App Store for a few days, and now finally it is gone again–perhaps for good.

Although I don’t have a 3G iPhone, I still wanted to test NetShare and see if it will work with EDGE and how fast will the connection be. Fortunately, there is still a way to install the software and test it on a first generation iPhone with an upgraded 2.0 firmware.

Step 1. Prepare Your iPhone to Run Modified “.ipa” Files

Follow my guide on my previous post on how to install and run modified .ipa files in your iPhone. More »

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Download and Test iPhone Apps Before Buying From the App Store

August 3rd, 2008 | Comments | Posted in iPhone, iPhone Apps

Update 2: If you upgrade to iPhone 2.1 with the PwnageTool 2.1, you need to perform this procedure again and use the patched MobileInstallation 2.1 file.

Update 1: If you upgrade to iPhone 2.0.1 with the PwnageTool 2.0.2, you need to perform this procedure again.

So you have jailbroken your iPhone 2.0 with the PwnageTool so you can enjoy more applications from the official iPhone App Store and from 3rd party application developers by way of Cydia (and from the soon to be released Installer 4.0). Well, there is another reason why a jailbroken iPhone is better than one that is not—and that is, you can download the applications, albeit modified, so you can install, run and test them before buying the official version from the App Store.

These iPhone apps has the .ipa extension and you can download them from certain sites if you know where to find them. Then you have to do the following to save the apps to iTunes and sync them to your iPhone. More »

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