App of the day 9: SSH, RDP, WordPress and Drupal

Aug 25, 2011 | iPhone apps, Technology | 2 comments

I’m coming to the end of the ten iPhone apps in ten days series so today I thought I’d spoil the system administrators and website developers out there by telling you of four little apps I just couldn’t do without.

If you use a content management system such as WordPress or Drupal you’re going to want to look at the apps for these available on the iPhone. Write posts, approve or reject comments and even look at visitor stats. The wordpress and drupal apps provide quite similar functionality and they’re both very easy to set up.

Looking at wordpress for a moment, this app allows you to write, edit and publish pages and posts, it allows you to reject, delete and approve comments, the app also allows you to attach images and format text in posts and pages with almost all the control you get from the web based editor and if you have the stats plug in installed and your account is connected to wordpress.com you can even look at your site usage statistics. The wordpress app works with sites hosted on wordpress.com and self hosted wordpress sites downloaded from wordpress.org. The app is free although there are more powerful statistics apps with an attached cost that plug in to wordpress if this is important to you.

The apps available for Drupal are either simply called Drupal or iDrupal. Both require additional modules when using both Drupal 6 or seven and both provide very similar functionality to the WordPress app. Because I’ve already covered this, I won’t go into much more detail. Drupal 6 requires modules for uploading images into posts and pages so if possible I’d encourage you to use Drupal 7 with this app.

The next two apps are simply life savers. Fortunately, I haven’t had the need to use them in quite a while but they always stay on my phone for that day that I know will come when I’m away from a computer but a service goes down somewhere or someone’s getting a funky error message that can’t be fixed through the various web control panels that are installed.

The first of these apps is RDP. This is a remote desktop client for the iPhone. Obviously, a Windows desktop was never meant to be viewed through such a small screen so this is usable only for a short time and due to the limitations of using Windows on such a small screen it’s not very nice to use however, it is secure, it is very fast and when it comes right down to it and you have no other choice but to log into a server remotely this is really useful. The app is simply called RDP and it is free from the App store. Unfortunately when you are in an RDP session you will not get any information from Voiceover. This is because for what are likely obvious reasons, the remote Windows interface cannot give any useful information to Voiceover to enable it to read.

Finally the last app for today is SSH terminal. I don’t know how many times this saved me when I first configured these servers. Thanks to the VPN connection on the iPhone I was able to log onto the network and check logs or start and stop services as needed. This app isn’t all that accessible using voiceover with speech output but it’s not through any fault of the app developer or the developers of Voiceover. It’s just the nature of console applications. It’s either all or nothing. You can read the entire screen or you can read nothing. With a Braille display you have a little more control so it’s a lot easier to get tasks done independently.

2 Comments

  1. alex

    Just curious, you mentioned the RDP client isn’t accessible using Voiceover. How then, do you accomplish what you need to do without voiceover? Is the audio ported over and you get a virtual keyboard or something, or are you stuck asking sighties for help?

    Great post!

    Reply
    • DigitalDarragh

      Your right. Unfortunately, the RDP access can not be done independently for users like myself who depend on Voiceover therefore sighted assistance is required while navigating through the remote system.

      Reply

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