App turns iPhone into ad-hoc MacBook num pad
Numberkey is a nifty iPhone app that extends your MacBook or MacBook Pro keyboard with an ad-hoc numeric keypad, which communicates with your laptop via WiFi. It comes with many different skins, from the modern chiclets to italicized numerals of the old Apple Extended.
Most of my spreadsheet days are behind me, but this strikes me as the sort of detail the iPhone or iPod Touch should do by default. The absence of the number pad is an understandable but regrettable omission from most laptops, and using the JKL keys with the number lock on has never felt right. Turning the iPhone into a laptop peripheral — whether as a number pad or tiny secondary display for widgets and the like — just feels right. I wouldn't be surprised if the iPhone continued to evolve in this direction as the firmware evolves.
Balmuda’s Numberkey connect software [Balmuda via Technabob]
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It would be great if the communication between the iPhone and the computer could allow people to use it as one of the mini screens you're always bringing up here. Have your gmail notifications on the little screen? Use it as a mini version of the context-specific OLED keyboards?
it's the return of the hugely expensive apple numeric keypad!
nethack in style
Oh my god, I did that!
A few months ago, I wrote a bunch of scripts to start a new 320x320 vncserver in an x session, so you could use a palm pilot, pocket pc, or iphone as an auxiliary display.
I am using an old T2 I got off ebay as an auxiliary display, it displays stats, and has a num keypad written in Perl Tk to let me stop xscreesaver by entering a pin.
Vnc actually pretty fast if you reduce the color depth, have low resolution that is native to the phone's tiny display, and try to have compressible opaque colors.
After disabling dithering and some other annoying stuff that gnome tried doing it's really quite usable.
Even over a slower bluetooth ppp connection.
Also, on unix anyway, vncserver runs in it's own separate display, with it's own independent settings, and isn't dependent on your desktop at all.
You could even use it on a server that doesn't have a graphical desktop installed.
And best of all, it's completely extensible, you can create a new interface to do anything you want, and it's as hard as writing a program on the host computer.
It's just as easy as setting DISPLAY=:1 (or whatever vncserver's dispaly number is) in a program before running it.
See, this is one of the things I want to write about in my blog, but I keep putting off setting it up.
But I was afraid someone would make something like this before me!
Anyway, if I can get my blog set up this afternoon, I will post about and submit it!
Bye!!
I dunno. Numberpads require tactile response to be efficient, like typing without looking at the keyboard. You can't type on an iPhone without looking, not efficiently at least.
We will never get throught the thousands of possibilities/options that offers this phone... !!!
"You can't type on an iPhone without looking, not efficiently at least."
Just like you can't play a violin or double-bass without looking, because it has no frets.
In fact, your comment was my first thought too, but it's possible with hand-placement/muscle-memory/repetion etc.
I've been searching and searching for the type of apps being described in the comments for a long time now. A system to pipe data to your iPhone as an auxillary display would be AMAZING.
I hope this concept goes places.
There's another option that does this, but with user defined keys.
PowerKeys
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=291796956
there you go ...
I don't do any 10 key but I really like the idea of knitting the hardware and software between the two.
Not necessarily true, I don't play violin but I don't need a visual reference to anything on a piano, bass or a '53 Gibson ES.