I did a review of Mobile TS back on May 4th which touches on the reasons why you may need/want access to RDC on your Palm. Mobile TS is a very good product. My only real negative was the price ($40).
On May 23rd I heard about EzRemote which sells for $25. Well that’s a 37.5% price decrease, certainly worth checking out.
I have to admit that I wasn’t too impressed with the 1.0 release (don’t stop reading just yet!). There were a few GUI issues to work out, and more seriously, I couldn’t get it to work. So I emailed the developer.
We exchanged 6 emails that same day, and by the end of it all, the GUI problems were fixed and the bug which had prevented me from using the program was fixed. I don’t think that it’s talking out of school to say that the problem was rather obscure (if you tried to connect to ports above 32768, it would fail) and yet he was able to track it down and fix it quickly.
In my book you can’t beat a responsive developer.
Have you ever used a program and thought “Wow, this does everything I need, I can’t imagine how they’d improve on it?” People get to used to the way that something works, it’s hard to change. That’s one of the big reasons why most of the web browsers look a lot like Internet Explorer, and why most “User Friendly” versions of Desktop Linux look a lot like Windows... People are used to the way they work.
That was really my experience with Mobile TS. Mostly my experience with it was so good that I hardly had anything to suggest to make it better, and looked at EzRemote through the lens of my experience with Mobile TS. It didn’t take long to see that EzRemote was different, but had some really compelling, different features.
![[EzRemote New Host Window]](http://palmaddict.typepad.com/photos/screenshots/ezremotenewhost320x320.png)
First: The login password is stored with the rest of the server information so you don’t have to type it in.
Given that typing a password is a critical part of the process, saving it seems like a good idea.
But that’s not the most amazing thing.
The biggest challenge when connecting to a machine with RDC is quite simply the screen size. Usually you have two options: resize the desktop down to the size of the Palm screen which is 320x320 if you are using a Treo or 320x480 if you are using a LifeDrive.
When you consider that 800x600 is now considered a low resolution for desktop computers (I have a monitor which runs 1600x1200) that’s just really tiny. Of course you have the option of connecting at higher resolutions, but then you have to deal with the fact that you can’t see all of the screen.
Mobile TS deals with this the way I think most of us would expect: scrollbars. What’s the problem with scrollbars? Well, for one thing, they take up space, precious pixels which are in dramatic short supply already. Plus they limit your movement to either the X or Y axis (that’s “across” and “up/down” for you non-technical types :-) — what happens if you’re at the top left and want to go to the bottom right?
The features that I’m going to describe... Well, they’re hard to describe. There’s a demo of the program you really ought to download and test it out to see it (Anyone know how to take movies of the Palm screen rather than just screenshots?).
One is “Pan” and the other is “Fit To Screen” — you can see them and other commands by pressing the menu button.
“Fit to Screen” is set to Menu-Z (think “Zoom”) or the “Hard 1” button (that’s the phone button on a Treo). “Pan” is set to Menu-P or press the “Hard 2” (Calendar) button. (Note: I hope this is obvious, but those only work when connected to a server via RDC.)
These features are simply crazy-useful. “Pan” mode lets you move in any direction across/up/down/sideways by simply dragging your stylus. “Zoom” reduces the entire screen — whatever the resolution — to the size of the display.
Moving around the screen has never been easier. It’s like the difference between a typewriter and a word processor.
There are other useful options available as well. The “Hard 3’ (Email/Messaging) button will send a right-click to wherever the stylus last touched. So if you want to see the context menu of a shortcut on your desktop, first tap it once with the stylus, then press the “Hard 3” button and the context menu will appear.
![[Menu]](http://palmaddict.typepad.com/photos/screenshots/ezremotemenu320x320.png)
The Menu also will let you Disconnect (Menu-D), or Restart the Computer (Menu-R... there is a prompt on the Palm before the command is sent to the remote server) or send CTRL+ALT+DEL (Menu-C) or the Windows Key (Menu-W) {see note}
Those are useful given that you are probably logging in to troubleshoot some problem which may simply be solved by rebooting the server. Again, using RDC on the Palm isn’t something you are going to choose to do for long periods of time (at least not willingly).
EzRemote is a worthy piece of software: well-developed, well-supported, and at a really good price point. If you are looking for RDC software, I highly recommend that you checkout both Mobile TS and EzRemote, but I would not be surprised if many of you decided on EzRemote based on features alone, and if that alone doesn’t convince you, the better the better price probably will.
