Review: Sofa Control a must-have companion for the Apple Remote
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
Jun 6, 2007 at 12:00pm
If you’ve got a Mac with an Apple Remote Control (which includes just about all of ‘em except the Mac Pro), you’re not taking full advantage of the remote unless you have CASE Apps’ Sofa Control 2.0, a Mac OS X 10.4. utility that lets you control any application on the Mac with the Apple Remote Control.
With version 2.0, Sofa Control supports more than 40 applications out of the box, including the iLife apps, Safari, and EyeTV. A specialized Front Row inspired user interface lets you access applicatio- specific menus or select movies and documents. The virtual mouse makes it possible to access rarely used functions and the keyboard can be simulated to control confirmation dialogs as well.
The interface, very Front Row-ish, is gorgeous and simple to use. And the included tutorial is one of the best-designed (and best looking) I’ve ever seen.
Sofa Control is scriptable. System level functionality like a sleep timer, changing the system volume and display settings are available in a customizable menu. In addition to the support for presentation software like Keynote, PowerPoint, Acrobat or VoodooPad, parts of a presentation can now be highlighted by just using the remote control.
What’s more, Sofa Control 2.0 offers cool new features such as a Virtual Mouse, a Mouse Light to highlight the important things of your presentations, newly designed global menus, and the ability to double click the buttons on your remote (the ability to map actions where multi-clicks are useful). Additionally, the ability to browse through files and open them on your disk drives gives sofa an edge over the other Apple remote apps I’ve tried.
As the final nice touch, Sofa Control 2.0 comes with French localization and support for the Keyspan RF Remote for Front Row to make it usable for Macs that don’t ship with a remote control.
Sofa Control is my idea of a perfect third-party app: very Mac-life, easy to use and offering a means to extend the functionality of my Apple products. If you have an Apple Remote (or one from Keyspan), you’ll want this baby.
It runs on Mac OS X 10.4.8 or later and is now available for US$14.90. Version 2.0 is a free upgrade for previously registered users.
Macsimum rating: 10 out of 10.
Larry Says:
I prefer Remote Buddy (http://www.iospirit.com) as its config is a snap, you don’t need to know AppleScript at all (I didn’t find a way in SC to config anything without knowing AppleScript by heart - which I don’t), it offers support for more than 70 apps, and it supports much more hardware! You can even type text on a on screen keyboard with the remote or browse iTunes library and use Coverflow mode. Can’t see any area where Sofa Control would be better, really.
Posted on June 09, 2007
Jon O Says:
I think Sofa Control is awesome and simple but full of finesse. At the price they’re asking, I’ll be buying! Sofa Control COSTS LESS than twisted melon or iospirit offerings. How many things do you need to do with a remote and a Mac? Idea: wireless keyboard. Glad that my old colleague Dennis did a review of this product - I discovered SC myself, and I ended up here since I was so pleased with it, looking for the price (CHEAP!) and comments. I visited the sites of the other two companies mentioned by me here: Maybe they should get reviews of their own products and note them on their site - there’s a thought.
Posted on July 26, 2007
Rob Johnson Says:
Way to go Dennis, Sofa Control is head and shoulders above the others, partly because it doesn’t get in the way of what you want to do with extra features.
I wrote a shareware teleprompter application and looked at four IR remote software apps to control it with and Sofa Control is by far the best. Second in line was iRed Lite and that’s only because it’s free while it’s in beta (V.9.8 tested).
Sofa Control does much more than I wanted and it’s feature set didn’t get in the way of what my intended purpose was, something which has been sadly forgotten lately.
Posted on September 18, 2007
Article Information
Comment on this Article Print this Article Email this Article Digg This
Contributor
Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 4,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
Lard Says:
I prefer Mira. Much slicker and moer easily adaptable to other applications.
Posted on June 07, 2007