iOS communicating with OS X

Question

I'm looking for a pointer in the right direction to get started with writing an iPhone app that sends commands to OS X, for example telling OS X to sleep. I can't seem to find the relevant part of the documentation?

Answer 1

AFAIK, most apps have been performing this kind of communication with a client/server design, where a "server" app runs on the host OS X machine, and a "client" app on the iOS device connecting using some sort of protocol (HTTP? Bonjour?).

You won't find this in the documentation because this is a niche design pattern that few apps need (especially since documents can now be shared more easily with the new version of iOS and iTunes).

Answer 2

iOS doesn't support ObjC remote objects, which would be the easiest way to communicate between two OS X machines.

An alternative to the HTTP client/server approach could be making your iPhone app connect in via a remote Unix shell to the OS X machine (via ssh) and then issuing Unix or AppleScript commands to perform your system actions.