X10 Commander

Enabling

X10 Commander support is enabled in the Preferences window.

Technical Details:

Next, ensure that your Mac firewall is not blocking incoming connections to Thinking Home. These settings are found in System Preferences -> Security -> Firewall. By far, the easiest choice is to leave the firewall off, which is the default setting.

Alternatively, you can turn it on and press the Advanced button to customize it. You can add allow Thinking Home to accept incoming connections. This is more difficult because it requires the background part of Thinking Home to be added to the list. The way to do it is to press the [+] button in the Firewall’s Advanced settings and it will prompt you to choose an application. Do not choose Thinking Home. Now go to the Finder and right-click on the Thinking Home icon to Show Package Contents. From there, go into Contents, then Resources and find ThinkingAgent.app. Drag that icon into the Firewall selection window and press the Add button. You may be prompted later to approve this choice when the first connection is attempted.

Now that the Mac is ready, you’ll want to ensure that the requests from the iPhone are routed from the internet to your Mac. This is an example of a router set up to forward port 6003 (default for X10 Commander) to a Mac whose address is 192.168.1.2. Your router will likely vary in appearance and terminology, but practically all routers offer this feature.

If unable to connect, your internet service provider may be blocking requests. To see if this is happening, you can use an external web site to check your firewall settings. The port-forwarding shown above should result in port 6003 being listed as open (good, for X10 Commander). This is one such site: http://www.auditmypc.com/security-scan.asp. Thinking Home should be running and listening for X10 Commander while this test is performed.

Using

Get X10 Commander from the iTunes Store and install it on your iPhone. Set the port to 6003 and use the same password as your Mac. Note that the slider does not adjust brightness directly — it controls how much the Dim/Bright buttons will adjust the light each time the button is pressed.