My Holy Grail Of iPhone Apps Arrives: pTerm | Hacker News Reader

My Holy Grail Of iPhone Apps Arrives: pTerm

theappleblog.com

27 pointsterpua29 comments

I understand developers wish to be rewarded for their effort but paying for a terminal program just seems so wrong.

Especially one based off of FOS code!

OSX was based on BSD and people don't mind paying for OSX...

I wonder if it would be against the NDA to write and distribute a targeted parser/rewriter that transforms a particular bit of FOSS code to something that runs on the iPhone?

You wouldn't be distributing your iPhone app's code. You wouldn't be distributing the FOSS code -- presumably it's already being distributed by someone else. What you would be distributing the source code for wouldn't be running on the iPhone.

Especially when you can just install a free ajax version on your own server, and access that from the iphones browser.

Eh, that might not be a good idea...

Erm why? https, password protected interface to an ssh webapp?

I see two major flaws with this approach. First, it's invasive. You have to open an additional hole in your network to allow traffic into the app, which makes your network inherently less secure. Second, unless you do an audit of the source, there are no guarantees as to the security of the app itself. This app of unknown reliability would be acting as a 24/7 gatekeeper into your network.

You could hide it behind VPN, I guess, but that kinda defeats the purpose of secure shell.

#2 also applies to a locally installed SSH app.

Not really. OpenSSH is a battle-tested ssh server. You can be resonably sure that opening it to the world will not compromise your network. Not so of this ajax ssh app. Basically it's a question of exposure. Am I comfortable exposing OpenSSH? Yes. Ajax ssh app? No way. Not without further testing and widespread acceptance.

Yes, really. Your statement was:

" Second, unless you do an audit of the source, there are no guarantees as to the security of the app itself. "

That applies to OpenSSH. Yes, you can trust it more as many other people use it. Are there guarantees (your words, not mine) as to its security? No.

With OpenSSH's recent fuckups, it's a good time to keep that in mind.

Cydia already has a terminal emulator and SSH (and nc if you need it) too.

there's another app that sounds like it will have more features that's still in the app store approval queue

http://www.zinger-soft.com/

post by dev: http://forums.macrumors.com/showpost.php?p=5977302&postc...

Ouch, that must really suck. They also could have been "the first iPhone terminal app" if they were just approved sooner.

This sounds like you could actually use it for work - they've emphasized key combinations and it has X too.

Here's hoping they use a decent sans font rather than the horribly unreadable serif crap that's been floating around most terminal apps.

My kingdom for the TAB key! Seriously, when you're using one of these little guys, be it Apple, Nokia, whatever, autocomplete is your friend! The tab key is always missing, or 3 clicks or taps away.

I couldn't believe there was no way to tab.

The screenshots of this app are horrible. It looks like whoever made it didn't use native iPhone GUI elements... the corners and edges of the toggle between SSH // Telnet // Raw TCP look like total crap. The text for the nickname, port, etc... seems to be squeezed a bit and it appears blurred (unless of course this is due to a photoshop edit later on).

And for $5... come on! PuTTY is free and open source, why isn't this too!

I upgraded to 2.0.1 and lost all my jailbroken functionality in exchange for stable and bug-free core features. I'm definitely going that route again once they catch up and release their latest Pwnage tool.

The screen shots in the article showed top running but clipped to fit in the screen. Does anyone know if they support multitouch zooming like Safari?

That would be great.

I don't think any of those screen shots were cropped, you can always see the status bar on the iPhone.

Wow, a feature that comes standard on other high-end phones? Unbelievable! http://maddox.xmission.com/putty3.gif

After waiting several months for developers to write and release code, you might be able to cobble together a bunch of apps that make up for the iPhone's flaws. The situation is identical to that of Windows.

No control key or ESC key? So much for doing ... anything.

There's a ctrl key in the top right of the screen rather than on the keyboard.

No quickly accessible tab either from what I can tell.

TouchTerm is only $2.99 as of this writing.

TouchTerm does not support terminal emulation. So, once you SSH into a server, good luck editing anything.

Some of us are old enough to have used ed(1) out of necessity. :-) These days, `sed -i' is also useful for quick one-liners.