I set up my old laptop as a media server and created a mac application in AppleScript that would remotely restart or shutdown the mac depending on which button was pressed, using this code:
tell application "Finder" of machine "eppc://USERNAME:PASSWORD@MYSERVER"
shut down
end tell
It’s super simple, and was easy to write, but now I want to create an iPad app that can accompany the mac one. Ideally, I’d like to use AppleScript as, like I said, it’s very simple, but I feel like that’s not an option.
What are some other ways to do this? Where I would click a button, then it would connect to my mac and either shutdown or restart.
I feel like the best way would be to use SSH, and right now I’m looking at https://github.com/x2on/libssh2-for-iOS. Any other ideas?
Okay, just to brainstorm…. Dropbox is a great way to share content among machines, but it’s also a pretty darn decent communication mechanism.
I use Dropbox to fire up (legal only!) bittorrent downloads on my home machine by setting up my torrent client to watch a dropbox folder for incoming .torrent files. I can then save .torrents into that directory on any machine I have Dropbox on, or in principle from a browser on my iOS devices that could share to Dropbox, and ta-da, instant remote kickoff. I can sit on another machine, save a .torrent to that directory, watch its file extension change to .torrent.imported, and know that when I get back to my main machine, that thing will be downloaded.
You could use folder actions or a cron job to watch a certain Dropbox folder for commands, and then put files into that folder that trigger those scripts to perform certain behaviors. Dropbox has a very nice iOS client library, making it totally possible to store stuff to Dropbox from a custom app.