App Reviews

Mocha VNC Lite

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 21:06:59 -0600

When I had need of a light-use VNC client on the iPhone, one issue seemed to interest me most--security. Unfortunately, I have yet to find an iPhone VNC client that will work via SSH tunneling. Given this, I decided not to spend money on a more complex VNC client, and went with the free Mocha VNC Lite client.

Mocha Lite gets the job done for the most part. You can save up to 6 host configurations and the responsiveness over wi-fi is usually reasonable.

However, I do have some occasional issues with Mocha VNC Lite being unable to refresh the screen. In addition, I often receive a warning message stating “iPhone is low on memory. Reboot the iphone. Using a smaller screen resolution on the VNC Server will require less memory.” Finally on the negative side, the Lite version of Mocha VNC does not provide a keyboard with command keys like control or option/alt.

For now, it’s a free way to visually access my desktop when I really have to. As for security, one slightly more secure step I take is to keep my VNC Server off on my Mac at home until I need to use it remotely. I then use an SSH client on my iPhone to connect to the Mac and start the VNC Server remotely. When I’m done accessing the VNC over my iPhone, I shut down the VNC Server again. The VNC connection itself is no safer, but at least my computer isn’t leaving up a VNC Server when I don’t need it.

TouchTerm (SSH App)

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 18:25:20 -0600

When searching for an SSH client, I chose the free version of TouchTerm and am generally satisfied with its capability given my basic SSH needs. You can save connections and recall them, choose to see the touch keyboard behind a translucent terminal window, and utilize a wide variety of other setting including the following (v 2.3):

Text entry: immediate entry or entry using an iPhone buffer, auto-return, auto-scroll to cursor, and allow scrollback
Terminal: full screen mode, translucent keyboard, UI transparency, and disable sleep
Display: font, font size, and colors
Security: save passwords, application locking, managing ssh keys, etc.
Advanced settings: persistent connections, text encoding, use SSH1, etc.

TouchTerm does lack certain features that other iPhone SSH apps boast including the ability to zoom the display by pinching and support for multiple simultaneous connections. I’ve read plenty of good things about other SSH apps out there (see my comparison page or search google for iPhone SSH reviews), but for a free alternative, TouchTerm seems to hold its own very well against the competition.

There is also a version of TouchTerm Pro, which boasts such advanced options as a command library, graphical filesystem navigation, and copy-paste. However, at a price of $14.99 (at the time of this writing), I’ll happily skip the pro version for now.