Review: FTPOnTheGo and TouchTerm SSH for iPhone

Categories:

Freelancing, iPhone

Tags:

apple, ftp, iphone, ssh

Published:

3:51pm on Friday 12th June, 2009

During our last family holiday, any serious client website issues meant a quick trip to the nearest town and an hour in the public library to use the creaky old PC they helpfully provide for vacationing web designers. This year, though, I can work directly on the server with my two new favourite iPhone apps: FTPOnTheGo and TouchTerm SSH.

FTPOnTheGo

The file handling capabilities of the iPhone have always been a little underwhelming, making the killer feature of FTPOnTheGo—downloading, editing, and uploading files—that much more impressive. But let’s start at the beginning.

The app sensibly opts to use the standard iPhone UI library rather than introduce their own graphical lexicon, so it all feels very natural and the learning curve is shallow. An unexpected addition is the presence of short YouTube “how to” videos available right in the app, which serve to introduce the basics to new users.

Simply provide a server address, username and password (or select from your bookmarked connections) to connect to a server either by FTP or SFTP. Once connected, you can browse through the files and folders; sort by name, size or date; upload pictures from your phone; create new files or folders; and rename, delete, move or save existing files. It’s also possible to use your iPhone as a Web or FTP server and share files from it, although I haven’t needed to use that feature yet.

But the real lifesaver for any web developer away from his desk is the file editing. Click a file then click the ‘Edit’ button to launch a basic text editor with support for Find/Replace, encoding changes, and usable in either portrait or landscape mode. When you’re finished editing, simply click ‘Save’ to upload the file back to the server.

While it’s obviously not the optimal device on which to code (and I’d like to see a more customised keyboard to make it easier to access commonly used keys such as angle brackets, plus the obvious enhancement of syntax highlighting) the text size is small enough to fit a sensible amount of text on the screen, and the ‘go to line number’ feature makes navigating large files easy enough.

The app is also chock-full of user settings, including a choice of folder icons (Vista, XP, Mac or “Old School”), fine control over the font used for file editing, and several granular security options. You can also set a master password for the whole app to protect your login information.

TouchTerm SSH

Of course sometimes simple FTP access isn’t enough to solve a server problem—what if you need to stop or start a service, or… well, my ssh-fu doesn’t extend to much beyond that, but for those who need it, the ability to connect directly to your server and run commands remotely might be a lifesaver.

There are a handful of SSH apps available on the iTunes App Store, but luckily the best is also the cheapest. TouchTerm SSH allows you to connect through either a stored connection or “One-Time Connection,” and also offers the option to either save or forget passwords. It also includes management of key pairs if you prefer to use those rather than passwords.

Connecting presents you with the standard monospaced-font-on-black Terminal/Console interface, with some neat iPhone-specific features. As you might expect the handset can be rotated to use in either landscape or portrait mode. Keys that you often need access to—Ctrl, Alt, Tab, Esc, the arrow keys—are presented along the top of the screen, or can be displayed permanently as a transparent overlay, allowing you to see what you’re typing as you work. The keyboard also works in the same way, and is surprisingly usable even with multiple lines of text behind it.

There’s a bit of a latency problem while typing (as there can sometimes be over SSH normally), but there’s also a fantastic setting that allows you to buffer your command(s) in a standard iPhone textbox before sending the whole line over the wire. It also maintains a history of the text you have sent, so accessing previous complicated commands is a doddle.

There’s not much more that can be said about an SSH client, except to mention that TouchTerm also boasts an impressive array of settings, including fine control over the appearance of the various elements, and security/encoding settings.

These apps are great value for money

TouchTerm SSH is only £0.60 ($0.99 on the US store), which amazes me considering the kind of people who are likely to need a fully featured SSH app. FTPOnTheGo is a little pricier at £3.99 (probably $5.99 in the US, at a guess), but for the peace of mind they bring when away from home they are definitely recommended for any iPhone-touting web developer.