Useful iPhone Apps for a Geek

What apps can a geek use to get by?

So you’re stuck without a proper laptop or desktop in the vicinity, you’re struggling to do all the tasks you want to do but you have your iPhone, what apps can you use to get by? Here’s a small selection of apps that I’ve found invaluable over the past few months.

IM+ (Price:£2.99)

I’ve tried a couple of IM apps and all of them seem buggy in some way to me, even this one. It was the first one I came across that worked and didn’t crash as much as the others, it’s also one of the few to already support push messages. It works with all the clients I use (MSN, Twitter, ICQ, Facebook, GTalk) and works quite well.

Jaadu VNC (Price:£14.99)

For anyone who has VNC machines they need to login to, this app is excellent. Some of the machines I login to have four monitors attached to them and Jaadu seems to be the only one that will support this well; the connection issues also seem non-existent too. I tried the free versions and also the mocha VNC apps but they just didn’t cut it, so although this costs a lot at £15 its worth the money if you’ll use it. The ability to check and alter anything from wherever you are is fantastic, works over edge too!

RemoteBoot (Price: 59p)

This is for when you are lazy and can’t be bothered to press the button to turn the computer on – or alternatively the machine you want to use on the network is not on. You can use this to send the device a ‘magic packet’ to wake it up. I often use this and it saves me a lot of hassle.

FTPOnTheGo (Price:£3.99)

This is useful as it does actually remember a fair few servers and bookmarks them. It uses a secure FTP to get through to your site (if supported). As well as browsing through you can delete, CHMOD, move, sort (different ways), upload, and create files/directories. You can download files from your server to your phone and then share them using the built-in web server or the built-in FTP server. If you are someone who uses FTP often you will understand that this can be quite a useful app to have on the go! The only improvements I would make would be to be able to select multiple files at once to download and upload, with some sort of shift-selection possible rather than having to click on them all.

Network Utility (Price: Free)

There is a free version and a Pro version of this app, I’ve not found any need to move to the paid version yet. This app is generally only useful for querying a particular device rather than a range of devices, but will perform lookups, port scans and pings. In terms of looking to see whether a service is avaiable on the device you want it to be at that time, this app will let you do that once you are connected to its network. I’ve used it to let me see what methods are available for me to connect to machines. Some of the features seem like they would only really be useful in situations where you don’t already know what is likely to be available on the network you are on and as such may not be used much. I couldn’t justify paying for this sort of feature unless I was to use it more – so the free version it remains for me.

Ping lite (Price: Free)

This is an app that will load really quickly and will ping, ping subnet, traceroute and telnet. I generally use this app because it’s one that will allow me to input ranges to query – I use it to see what devices are awake on a network. The telnet client isn’t as good as the other app reviewed, so i use this to discover what’s there and then use another app to connect to and use the services. For a free app this is good and does the job I would want it to.

TouchTerm SSH (Price: 59p)

This allows you to do one-off connections or a remembered one; it is very speedy in terms of connecting and bringing the interface up and does support SSH. The keyboard lets you see what you are writing above it as you write, supports persistent connections, and will let you disable the sleep function on your phone. It will also let you change the colour of the background and text – I have green on black, naturally… These features mean that you are able to easily access your terminal services and interface wherever you are. Personally I have a bunch of scripts that I use for various purposes, backing up for example, and I can set these to run (in addition to my CRON schedule of course ) at any given immediate moment. It allows me to restart devices and provides a way into machines that doesn’t always lockup as easily as other methods so is more stable. The one feature that of course makes all of this far easier to do… the landscape keyboard. If you have any SSH terminal services available to you – this is the app for you. I believe there is a Pro version to this app at £3 but I’ve not yet come across anything I couldn’t do easy enough with this cheaper version.

FreeMemory 1.4 (Price: 59p)

This will let you see what apps and services are running on your device at the time and will label all the core apps. It states how much memory you currently have left and the battery percentage left. This app was useful to have on my iPhone 3G but not so useful on my new 3GS. It will only let you use the free memory button if there is less than 20MB of the RAM left, and as the 3GS has twice as much I’ve not seen it happen yet! I’d recommend this for a 3G and maybe users of older iPhones, but 3GS users might as well not bother unless there’s an update that addresses the new amounts of RAM. If useful for your phone it does often stop you needing to reboot and will allow you to free up enough memory to run whatever application you are going to. Clicking the button and freeing up the memory is a lot quicker than waiting for the device to reboot, so in terms of time-savings this was excellent!