I was poking about Cydia this morning and came upon Veency; a VNC server for the iPhone. I use VNC between my desktop and laptop sometimes, if I want to use the desktop, but can’t (for some reason) sit at my desk, so I thought I’d check it out for the phone, just to see how it works, and it’s pretty goddamned cool. Useful…I don’t know yet. Cool…very definitely! 🙂

My main Springboard screen:

Pandora, playing Telemann from my Baroque station:

Mail accounts, and I even replied to P.’s morning message using my desktop’s keyboard instead of the phone’s. He said, “That’s my geek grrrrl!” (High praise from him!)

Teh Google in Safari:

WordPress iPhone client:

It’s pretty simple: left click is touch, right click is home button and middle click is lock/unlock. I haven’t played with it for long, but I’m sure I’ll find some use for it. I have to be at the phone to authorise the connection, but I suppose I could remember to do that if I put the phone on the charger during the day. That way, when I get a text, I wouldn’t have to heave my bulk out of my desk chair and walk over to read it. I guess it would also be useful when I’ve begun typing an email message on the phone and it starts to get so long that typing on the phone keyboard isn’t fun anymore. I could do the same by saving a draft, logging into email and then finishing the message, but that doesn’t help if I’ve started it in whatever that app is that allows me a landscape keyboard where I can type and then send to mail. Even if it’s not useful to the point of “gotta have”, it’s still fun to be able to control the phone from the computer. I think there are a couple of VNC clients in the App Store that allow one to control a computer from the phone, but they’re fairly expensive (+$20), “lite” (Jesus H. Christ, how I hate that spelling) versions would be so crippled that they’d just piss me off, and I’m not sure I’d use one enough to warrant paying that much. Maybe…I guess I’ll just play with the server and see how many times I think, “Damn…wish I could do this the other way around!” I guess it might be rather useful if I’m playing music from Rhythmbox on the desktop and decide I want to change the playlist, or just skip ahead one song, or something like that. Dunno…we’ll see, but for now, I’ll just play around and see what happens! 🙂