Flash on the iPhone! (almost)

Jason Whong — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 13:53:55 -0500

Sweet! Donald Driver just added 8 yards for the Garbage Plates, making it that much harder for the St. Mary's Blue Crabs to eat my team for lunch.

The iPhone and VNC make a useful combination. Back in August, we posted an item explaining how to use VNC to start downloading iTunes videos remotely. Controlling the Mac from an iPhone is one benefit of VNC. Leveraging the Mac's computing power through VNC can also be a way of making your iPhone do something it otherwise wouldn't be able to do.

This year, I joined my little brother's fantasy football league at Yahoo! Sports. It's my first ever fantasy sports experience.

I signed up for real-time scoring through Yahoo!'s StatTracker service, and watched as plays made by people on my roster increased my score. It was useful the week I signed up. The week after that, I had a family reunion to attend. I figured I would check StatTracker to see how my, my brother's, and my mom's teams were doing. With just my iPhone, I had no such luck! StatTracker requires Flash.

The family reunion reminded how much fun it was to watch football, so this week I decided to catch some high-definition NFL action (much to the surprise of my wife, who didn't think she had married a football fan). After a few minutes, I realized I had the same problem that I did at the family reunion: with no computer capable of running flash in the same room as my TV, I couldn't use the StatTracker service I had paid for.

Then I remembered that I had set up my Mac mini for remote access through VNC, and that I had installed Mocha VNC Lite on my iPhone. VNC lets the host computer do all the computing tasks, and sends images from the screen to the client. It enabled me to see real-time scoring statistics on my iPhone, rather than having to leave the room (or needing to use a laptop).

There were only two flaws: My iPhone's Auto-Lock time was set to one minute, which caused the screen to turn off and the VNC connection to terminate. (Set it to "Never" in Settings>General>Auto-Lock.) Also, the VNC connection was interrupted a few times, but it was simple to reconnect.

While use of VNC technology enabled me to view a Flash application on my iPhone, it's not exactly a substitute for having actual Flash on the iPhone, which may end up sucking anyway. VNC doesn't have a mechanism for transmitting sound, and it can be too slow for watching video or animation. But in situations like these, VNC is ideal.

Mac|Life VNC RSS Feed

Flash on the iPhone! (almost)