iPhone App – LogMeIn

LogMeIn’s Ignition for iPhone Provides Sleek Remote Access.

-Glenn Fleishman

LogMeIn is the first service I recommend for those without MobileMe accounts who want to establish remote screen connections to computers under their control. The LogMeIn Free service, available for some time for Mac OS X and much longer for Windows, allows a browser-based session that’s better than VNC, Leopard’s Screen Sharing, and Timbuktu Pro. The company, also called LogMeIn, has brought this approach to Ignition, an iPhone and iPod touch application.

Ignition lets you connect to a LogMeIn account where you’ve registered machines with their software installed, and then connect to a computer from a list of machines that show which are active and which are inactive.

When you connect, the screen appears shrunk to fit the iPhone or iPod touch’s screen, and pinching and expanding works just like with photographs.

In the default mode, you drag the screen under a fixed mouse pointer in the middle of the screen, and tap to indicate a mouse click. That behavior can be switched to perform mouse like dragging, instead. Separate controls allow you to bring up a keyboard, or use the application-switching Command-Tab shortcut.

At $29.99, Ignition might seem steep, especially compared with Free. But it’s worth the price. I received a free review copy, but I was about to purchase the product at that point. I’ve tried several of the other VNC-based iPhone remote access apps, including Jaadu VNC ($19.99), which was previously my best-in-breed choice.

Ignition beats Jaadu VNC and all other comers by pairing with LogMeIn’s centralized registration and connection system. When you install LogMeIn on a computer, the system registers itself with LogMeIn’s servers, and uses a variety of network address translation (NAT) techniques to allow a remote session. Ignition ties into that, where Jaadu relies on an open VNC setup, which requires typically much more work.

Timbutku Pro paired with Skype is both very expensive (TB2 Pro costing $179.95 for two licenses; Skype is free), and less reliable. Timbuktu allows file transfers, where VNC-based applications and LogMeIn do not. But you can use DropBox or iDisk or other methods to pass files among machines. (Timbuktu also needs an overhaul of its inefficient screen sharing technology: VNC, Screen Sharing, and LogMeIn can use adaptive color depth and compression for much faster screen refresh rates. And Timbutku’s file-transfer dialog is a crying shame, and has been for well over a
decade after they should have revisited it.)

I tested Ignition over a variety of networks and was happy with the results. When visiting my parents in Port Townsend a few days ago, I was able to demo the program to my dad with a few taps and clicks, and then pull up a piece of information I’d left on my computer back in Seattle by typing into Yojimbo.

I’ll make my usual plaint here: If Apple would simply bend a little, add the Bluetooth HID profile that allows keyboards and mice to pair with an iPhone or iPod touch, a program like LogMeIn and a few other utilities would allow me on shorter trips to leave a laptop behind and still have full access to remote machines and remote logins.

Copyright © 2008 Glenn Fleishman. TidBITS is copyright © 2008 TidBITS Publishing Inc. If you’re reading this article on a Web site other than TidBITS.com, please let us know, because if it was republished without attribution, by a commercial site, or in modified form, it violates our Creative Commons License.

By glenn@tidbits.com (Glenn Fleishman). [TidBITS: Mac News for the Rest of Us]