Steve and I took an important step toward friendship today.

Jaadu VNC (I think they changed the name of their app to iTeleport or something.) released an iPad update, and now I can nicely VNC to other machines. The picture is a screen shot of Excel 2010, on Windows 7, VNC’ed to from Steve. It’s almost a viable solution.

So if Jaadu VNC did all the work, why am I better friends with Steve? Well, because this is an example of the vision coming to fruition. I think there is an industry of apps out there that will make the iPad worth $299 (The other $200 will always be hype).

I first VNC’ed to my OSX laptop from my iPhone a year ago. That was anticlimactic bec the screen was so small that it was really painful to use. and bec the VNC server crashed on my laptop at home, rendering it useless. I got burned a couple of times and quit using it.

I wish there were an actual keyboard on the iPad, complete with tab, shift, arrows, numbers, and the rest. All this clicking from screen to screen is fine on the iPhone, but the iPad feels like it should be different.

This Win7 install runs on a server in my closet. I installed VMware’s ESX 4.0 on it last fall. I have half a dozen vm’s, one of which is running Win7. That’s where I have VS2010 and Office 2010. Thanks to MIT I have four static IP addresses. Currently thinking about what I’m going to do when I leave this mini Garden of Eden. EC2?

My dream is to be able to use my iPad (Steve) as just a UI for all of my vm’s. Maybe the solution includes a real keyboard that I carry around with Steve. Don’t know.

That reminds me that I need to search for a shell application for the iPad. Hmmm.