iTeleport ($24.99)

We admit that iTeleport isn’t cheap and is more than a little geeky, but it’s so cool and potentially useful that we would have been remiss had we not included it.

iTeleport is technically a VNC (Virtual Network Computing, also known as remote screen control) client. Put another way, it’s an iPhone app for controlling your Mac, Windows, or Linux computer “from a few feet away or from halfway around the world.”

Yes, you can actually see your computer screen and control its keyboard and mouse from anywhere in the world (as long as your iPhone can connect to the Internet through Wi-Fi, 3G, EDGE, or whatever).

Figure 18-8 shows an iPhone running iTeleport, which is controlling a Mac in another room (though the Mac could just as easily be in a different city, state, or country).

iTeleport is an iPhone app, so you pinch and unpinch to zoom in and out. In Figure 18-8, we zoomed in on the upper-left corner of the Mac screen, where a chapter is being edited in Microsoft Word.

There’s little you can do on your Mac, PC, or Linux computer that you can’t control remotely with iTeleport — though of course you’re dealing with a smaller screen on the iPhone. We use iTeleport to check mail accounts other than the ones on our iPhones, to grab files from our hard drive and e-mail them to ourselves (at our iPhone e-mail addresses) or others, and to make sure backups are running when scheduled.

Figure 18-8: I’m editing this chapter with Microsoft Word while controlling my Mac remotely with iTeleport.

Another cool use for the app is as a spy cam. This feature requires that you have a computer with a built-in camera, such as an iMac or any of the MacBook models. Open an app that uses the built-in camera (for example, Photo Booth on the Mac or a webcam program under Windows), and you’ll be able to watch what’s happening in front of that computer on your iPhone no matter where in the world you happen to be.

Several free or less expensive VNC apps are available in the iTunes Store, but iTeleport is the only one we’ve found that is robust and reliable enough to recommend.