What happens if you want to controll your computer from your couch, but your mouse doesn’t work that far away? Well if you have a iTouch or iPhone, there are many “Mouse”, or even “Keyboard” apps in the appstore, but all of them cost money. However, there is one app, SnatchTest, which is completely free! To controll your computer with it, all you have to do is install a super simple software onto your pc from the developers website, and connect your computer.
As a splash screen for this app you see the trackpad, which can be a little confusing because it is still not configured to work with your pc.
After the splash screen is gone, you don’t notice much chage, unless you have the app already configured, in which case you will be able to start controlling your pc/mac immediately. However, when first run, you must go to the settings (the red “i” icon at the bottom) to configure. If everything is working properly and the Snatch Server is running, you should see your computers’ name:
After selecting your computer, you will be prompted to input the password, if you chose to use on on the server, and then you’re good to go. However, I could not connect this software to my computer with a password, so I dissabled it.
However, I could not connect this software to my computer with a password, so I dissabled it – and I could instantly connect to my computer.
Now the “i” at the bottom will turn green, and you can use the trackpad just like you would use on any laptop. There are also some settings that you can change, such as the inertia (it is very annoying, so I disabled it), the speed and the position of the left button.
As you can see here, I am using my (still broken) iPhone to browse through the blog
App Pros
+Only free mouse app in appstore
+Simple to set up
+Quickly connects to laptop, even after loosing connection
+Very responsive, most of the time you feel that you are using a real mouse
+The software plays the “Device Connected/Disconnected” sound when the device connects/disconnects
+If everything works properly, you can controll your pc within 1 second of turning on the app!
App Cons
-It drops the connection after the device auto locks, if WiFi connection lost, it takes a while to connect.
-The password feuture didn’t work for me
-No scroll, right click and no keyboard (but after all, this is a free mouse app!)
Conclusion
Very nice app, I recomend it to anyone looking for a free mouse app. The simplicity was awesome, the app was fluid, fast and most importantly simple!
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