What is Vectir?Vectir is an application that allows you to remote control your PC from your phone. They support a large number of phones and the important part is that they support my new phone (BlackBerry Storm 2). What makes it even cooler is that you get the option of connecting via Bluetooth or WiFi. Both these worked perfectly. Unfortunately the WiFi option worked only when I was on the same local WiFi network. This has the potential to give your new remote virtually infinite range, but for some reason Vectir failed to connect to my PC even after I gave Vectir my public IP and setup port forwarding on my PC. Hopefully that will be sorted some time in the future. Vectir comes with support for some popular applications like iTunes, Windows media player and my long time favourite Winamp. Each set of controls is called a profile. If you are the picky type, you can modify the functionality of a specific profile. But if you are like me, there will always be that application that you would like to control but is not supported. One example of this was the ability to control VLC or hibernate windows using my phone. Vectir comes with the standard shutdown, reboot, logoff options, but lacked the hibernate option.
A simple way to add support for your application?The good news is that Vectir comes with some very flexible built in plugins that allow you to extend it's functionality quite easily. These include the ability to send key strokes, mouse clicks or execute command line programs. A good tutorial for creating a new profile for VLC can be seen here. A quick example is the ability to hibernate the computer. This can be done quite simply using the command line plugin provided in Vectir and using the following command line c:\windows\system32\rundll32.exe powrprof.dll,SetSuspendState HibernateBut if you are like me, you will soon realise that there is so much the command line can do. You will probably quickly come to the point where even the command line and sending key strokes has it's limitations. One way to get around this is to make your command line applications. While this is a good option it is not very extendible. What makes Vectir truly awesome is the ability to extend it's functionality via plugins. At the time of writing I was not able to find any tutorials on writing a plugin for Vectir, so I have decided to share my recently gained knowledge with you.
Getting startedWe will look at the basic framework of the the VectirSDK. While you can get a sample project from the Vectir developer section, I prefer starting from a clean slate to fully to get a clear picture of what I am trying to do. Before we get started, a couple of notes:
I'm not a Vectir expert/insider. I just downloaded the SDK, messed around with it for a couple of hours and got things working. So if you notice if anything is out of order, let me know.
I used Visual Studio 2008 Professional. Apparently you can use the free Express edition, but then I have not tried this, so you may run in to problems
Read more: Codeproject
A simple way to add support for your application?The good news is that Vectir comes with some very flexible built in plugins that allow you to extend it's functionality quite easily. These include the ability to send key strokes, mouse clicks or execute command line programs. A good tutorial for creating a new profile for VLC can be seen here. A quick example is the ability to hibernate the computer. This can be done quite simply using the command line plugin provided in Vectir and using the following command line c:\windows\system32\rundll32.exe powrprof.dll,SetSuspendState HibernateBut if you are like me, you will soon realise that there is so much the command line can do. You will probably quickly come to the point where even the command line and sending key strokes has it's limitations. One way to get around this is to make your command line applications. While this is a good option it is not very extendible. What makes Vectir truly awesome is the ability to extend it's functionality via plugins. At the time of writing I was not able to find any tutorials on writing a plugin for Vectir, so I have decided to share my recently gained knowledge with you.
Getting startedWe will look at the basic framework of the the VectirSDK. While you can get a sample project from the Vectir developer section, I prefer starting from a clean slate to fully to get a clear picture of what I am trying to do. Before we get started, a couple of notes:
I'm not a Vectir expert/insider. I just downloaded the SDK, messed around with it for a couple of hours and got things working. So if you notice if anything is out of order, let me know.
I used Visual Studio 2008 Professional. Apparently you can use the free Express edition, but then I have not tried this, so you may run in to problems
Read more: Codeproject
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