I got an email recently to review the brand new Off! Remote, which was released on the Apple App Store. It retails for 0.99USD and it comes from the maker of VLC Remote, Rob, as Apple annoyingly allows only beta testers from the USA, Rob has kindly sponsored the App so that I can review it. The remote however, works for both WinXP, Vista, Windows 7 and Mac OSX 10.5 and later.
Simply put, Off is for the lazy human being in you, because from now onwards you do not even need to manually switch off the computer, you just use Off to do it for you. So basically after a great movie you’re sitting on the couch and want to fall asleep, you just switch it off with your Off remote instead of putting your hand to depress the on/off switch.
Very soon we’re going to be like Wall-E, and develop disproportional arms and legs because technology is doing everything for us.
Before you log in, you are required to install the Off-Helper from Hobbyist Software. If you don’t do that, the remote will scan endlessly for all the computers on the wireless network. Another thing is, the Off! Remote works only on all computers connected to your wireless network, similar to how the iTunes remote connects to iTunes. So don’t expect to just point and it works instantly.
The Off! Helper needs to then be switched on via the System Preferences. You can put a password so that your Off! Remote just switches off that particular computer.
Only then, you are ready to start the scanning for the computers on the wireless network. The scanning takes some time though, at least for my wireless network. But it eventually found Summer’s MacBook.
With that, you get four different options – Off, Sleep, Restart and Lock. Its pretty intuitive to use the remote after this step. Although when you press any option and you want to change the option you seriously need to stop it on the computer very quickly because it executes in only a few seconds. And if you want to shut down you need to make sure you are able to stop all processes because probably things like Firefox, Transmission, etc will start bugging you to manually shut things down.
Otherwise, the interface is very clean and if you can take the effort to set things up for the remote, its actually nice to be really lazy and not even get off the couch for anything again.
Get it: here.
