TouchTerm - The iPhone App I have been waiting for

Submitted by timmillwood on Mon, 09/29/2008 - 21:11

When I got my iPhone about 9 months the one app I wished for was a terminal. I wanted somthing to enable me to quickly login to my servers and fix problems when in work and stuck behind a proxy or when away from the desk.

There was first a web app which turned out to be a joke, luckily I had that thought and tried it with bogus details. Then there was a homebrew app, but I failed at jailbreaking my iPhone. Then there was another web app, but this time hosted on your own server. This took a little bit of fiddling and messing about to get setup, and was a little clunky, but did do the job.

Finally there was TouchTerm (iTunes link) a real iPhone app from The App Store for the small fee of £1.79. I works in a very similar way to WebShell (the last web app) but being a real application it doesnt depend on Safari or the server to run.

As you can see from the screenshots the app makes use of the motion sensor in the iPhone to display the terminal in landscape or portrait mode. You will also see that keys such as Ctrl and Tab are accessible along with directional arrow keys.

There isn't really one problem I can see with this app apart from iPhone issues such as the screen size and the lack of copy and paste.