Do Something Different with Your Wireless Connections and Home Zone

March 18th, 2007 at 3:00 PM - Columns and Opinions by John F. Braun

Home Zone 0.9.7 (Public Beta)
Jonas Witt

Computer connectivity has certainly come a long way since the first PowerBook. Itis hard to believe that there was a time when all of your network and device connections had to be made using physical cables. Of course, todayis Mac users can take advantage of both Airport and Bluetooth to connect to their network and devices. But you can do much more than simply connect, if youire using the right software.

Home Zone is a small application that, once started, lives in your menu bar. The application has three major areas, Zones, Triggers and Actions. A Zone is a collection of Airport and Bluetooth devices that you can detect when you are in a particular location, and can be named accordingly, such as "Home" or "Office." Once youive named a Zone, you can then define the Triggers, which are Airport and Bluetooth devices, that are in this Zone. You can choose for the trigger to be activated when any, all or none of the devices are available.

Define Your Home Zone Zones, Triggers and Actions

Once youive defined your Zones and Triggers, the fun begins, because now you can define some Actions to be performed when you either enter or leave a Zone. One of the actions is "Disable Screen Saver Password," and could be used as an enhancement to your overall security plan. The thought being that if you are on a certain network, and perhaps have a certain Bluetooth device in your possession, you are near your computer and donit need to enter a password. Of course thereis a "Enable Screen Saver Password," which you can activate if you detect you are leaving a Zone.

There are several other actions available, such as Change Network, which changes your Network Location. You can also Mute, Unmute or Set System Volume, or Lock Keychains. You can also Pause iTunes or Start Screensaver, and for the ultimate in flexibility, you can Open File, which will open the file, script, application or URL of your choice. And Home Zone uses the Growl notification system, so youill know what itis up to.

So take the opportunity to do some really interesting with your wireless connections, and give Home Zone a try! Have any other wireless gadgets that you think are worthy? Send an email to John and heill give it a shot.

John is a software engineer who works in the corporate R&D group of a Fortune 500 company, focusing on imaging and printing technologies. He has AS, BS and MS degrees in various computing disciplines, so his friends and colleagues are somewhat surprised that he’s a Mac enthusiast.  After spending the day developing in an environment comprised largely of PCs, and watching colleagues wrestle with the horror that is Windows, he’s glad to come home to a MacBook Pro and PowerMac G5 at the end of the day.