Flying Mac Blog

With FarFinder’s return to the App Store, there is a change to streaming video and audio from your Mac to your iPhone: this is now only possible over wi-fi, not over 3G. If you’re on a 3G connection and there’s something you really want, you can still download the file to your phone first, then watch it (if it’s in a format playable by your phone, of course).

Apple have changed the App Store rules since FarFinder’s previous release; streaming media over 3G has now some weighty requirements around it and FarFinder in its previous form would no longer be accepted. Implementing Apple’s new requirements for on-demand streaming is a large undertaking, involving on-the-fly transcoding of media files into multiple formats, and there are enough gotchas that it would be difficult to do well.

There are at least two apps that are devoted solely to this feature. If you’ll miss video streaming, have a look at this article. Because they actually convert your media files, these apps should play a much wider array of video formats than FarFinder ever has.

You might think your Mac needs to be awake constantly so you can connect to it with FarFinder or Webjimbo. In fact, your Mac can be woken up when it’s needed if you have an Airport Base Station and are running Snow Leopard.

Try it out – it’s simple – but make sure you test it before you rely on it!

Airport Base Station – wired connection

• Open System Preferences
• Choose Energy Saver
• Laptop users: select the Power Adapter section
• Tick the “Wake for ethernet network access” option (wording may vary)

Now it should be safe to let your Mac go to sleep. When you connect to FarFinder or Webjimbo, your Mac
should wake up. Make sure you test it from another computer on your network if you can.
If you have trouble, there’s lots more information in
this Macworld article.

Airport Base Station – wireless connection

If you have a newish Mac (2009 onwards, perhaps), the above should work on a wireless
connection too. If your Mac supports this, the option described above will be called
“Wake for network access”. Again,
the Macworld article
has useful information.

Everyone else

If you don’t have an Airport base station, or if the above doesn’t work for you, your options are:

• Stop your Mac going to sleep using Energy Saver in System Preferences
• Schedule sleep and wake times if you know you don’t need to connect to your Mac at certains times of the day or night,
  thereby saving power.
  You might not save much money, but it’s good for the environment.
• Investigate wake-on-LAN (advanced users only). Note that wake-on-lan is not built into the applications, nor is it likely to be in the future. Your
  aim is to wake your Mac up, then connect to FarFinder or Webjimbo as usual.

“Find Me Anywhere” service for beta users

If you’re using this service for people on difficult networks, you won’t be able to connect to your Mac if it’s asleep. Sorry.