We also had a positive experience during our field testing, both on remote Wi-Fi and via LTE (Verizon). In our office, the app is snappy and works great. Parallels claims to have built Access to withstand varying levels of bandwidth. The app will even pass sound from your computer to the iPad’s speaker, although the quality will vary depending on the connection speed and, even with the best bandwidth, there is always a sync delay, meaning that you won’t be using Access to watch movies on your PC or Mac. They are resized to fill the iPad’s screen, and basic controls like scrolling and right-click work as expected. Other apps that don’t have dedicated touch mode are dealt with as well as possible. It’s a nice little touch (pun) that makes the prospect of using Word or Excel on your iPad far more practical. Parallels enables Access to automatically trigger this mode when you launch an Office app on your iPad, and disable it when you disconnect (you can also manually disable touch mode if you prefer the standard interface). This special mode was built-in by Microsoft to make Office apps easier to use on Windows tablet devices icons are larger and more spaced out and only common functions in the Ribbon interface are displayed for simplicity. Speaking of small icons, another great feature of Access is integration with “touch mode” in Office 2013. When it’s time to get more precise, users can hold down their finger to bring up the familiar iOS magnification bubble, and holding down over a button gives the user temporary access to the on-screen mouse for more precise control in apps that use small icons. Even copy and paste works between your remote connection and native iPad applications, allowing users to grab text from a remote Word document and paste it into your Notes app or vice versa.Īccess also interprets your multi-touch gestures into commands that desktop apps understand, such as dragging your finger to activate a mouse wheel scroll, and two-finger taps to emulate a right-click. Common iPad features such as selection pins and context-aware buttons are all available via the app, even when you’re running Windows software. Once you’ve settled on a particular application using the Application Launcher or Switcher, you’ll find that Parallels has built in some nifty functionality to make the experience as iPad-friendly as possible. Tap the computer you wish to connect to and you’ll be taken to the App Launcher screen. You can configure multiple computers, including combinations of Macs and PCs, for use with a single account. And that’s all once you’ve completed these two steps and both the client and agent are running, you’ll see your computer appear as an option inside the iPad app. Once installed, you’ll log into this agent with the same Parallels Account credentials you used for the iPad client. Next, head over to your PC or Mac and download the corresponding desktop agent for your operating system. First, you’ll need to download the free iPad app from the iTunes Store and log in to it with a Parallels Account, which can conveniently be created right on the device itself. Getting started with Access is relatively easy. It does take some time to get used to the new gestures in Access, and not every app works perfectly, but overall the service provides a far better experience than that offered by standard remote connection applications. The end result is a full-screen-like experience on your iPad that makes many apps look and feel as if they were natively ported to iOS. So Access works some magic in the background and automatically and intelligently resizes, repositions, and modifies applications into a more touch-friendly form, a process that Parallels calls “applifing.” For some apps, this process is as simple as automatically resizing a window to fit the iPad’s screen resolution for others, it involves deeper changes, such as automatically enabling “ touch mode” in Word 2013 to make interface icons larger and easier to tap. The folks at Parallels recognize that a 9.7-inch (or smaller, for the iPad mini) screen and a touch interface is not an ideal way to interact with your potentially huge desktop and loads of apps that were built to be used via a mouse and a keyboard. So why should you pay Parallels a yearly fee (which is currently $80) to view your computer’s desktop from your iPad? Well, it’s because Access goes beyond simply mirroring your desktop. Remote access apps are nothing new, and there are frankly dozens of choices for Mac and Windows users, many of them free.
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