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.
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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.
