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Remember the wireless "Active Badge?" How about a Bluetooth badge?

Your Mac computer has a mouse and a keyboard. Why on earth would you consider using your Bluetooth phone to control it? Because you can? Well, how about, because it knows you're there?

Academics have long discussed Dr Andy Hopper's wonderful concept of the Active Badge. It would let you sit down in front of any display and keyboard, and start using it as if it were your own PC. Well, perhaps we've just taken one serious step towards that dream.

There's a perfectly splendid multi-page, serious review of an apparently pointless, utterly useless, time-wasting software product called Salling Clicker to be found on Mac Dev Center.

It solemnly takes you through, step by step, the install and the operational routines of this surely absurd $9.95 shareware program from the mind of Jonas Salling. And as you can see, it actually lets you look at the five-line display of your Bluetooth phone, instead of the lovely wide screen of your $2,000 23 inch Cinema HD display.

Then, buried on page two (keep going!) you'll find reviewer Wei-Meng Lee has discovered the killer part of the app: the proximity sensor.

"The Salling Clicker has one very cool feature called the Proximity Sensor. Imagine that you are listening to iTunes while you are working on your Mac. When you leave your Mac (presumably bringing your phone along with you) you might want iTunes to pause. And when you are back, you might want to continue playing music in iTunes again. This is the use of the Proximity Sensor; it allows you to specify actions to perform when you leave your Mac and also when you are back."

That's the trivial application. In a corporate environment, however, it could form the basis of a (pretty secure!) form of identification for computer access. You'd have to enter a PIN, perhaps; but you'd also have to have your own phone, switched on. And when you moved upstairs, you could carry on your session.

Similar systems have been proposed for RFID tags, and they're perfectly feasible, no doubt. But here's a product which actually works - albeit, only with Macs today! - and assumes only that you already have a Bluetooth phone.

Which is more likely; that you'll have an RFID tag, or that you'll have the Bluetooth phone? And which system is going to allow you to use remote systems even in someone else's house? One day ...