Q: Does TouchTerm support Unicode and/or other international character sets?

A: Yes, TouchTerm supports Unicode using the UTF-8 encoding. Starting with TT 2.2 (and TT Pro), we also support the ISO-8559 Latin-1 and Latin-2 codepages, as well as plain ASCII.

Our future planse include support for the Big5, GB, and other ISO-8559 encodings. Please let us know if you experience any issues with UTF-8 encoding, or if there are other encodings we should support!

Q: Will TouchTerm or TouchTerm Pro support port forwarding?

A: Probably not -- the iPhone is not capable of supporting a port forwarding application, due to its restriction that there cannot be any background processes. If TouchTerm were to set up a port for forwarding, then as soon as TT is exited (via the Home button, for example), then TT is terminated and the port closed, so there's no way to switch to another app with the forwarding still up.

However, if you think there can still be a valid use case for supporting port forwarding on TT, then let us know! There aren't really any technical hurdles to adding it, we just can't (yet!) see any utility for it.

Q: I've read that TouchTerm is based on OpenSSH and other SSH clients are based on PuTTY. What's the difference? Does it matter?

A: Yes, TouchTerm is based on the open-source library OpenSSH. Although PuTTY and OpenSSH obviously overlap on the surface, there are some very real differences in the core.

The most obvious difference is probably in the history and platform support between the two. PuTTY was designed for Windows, and has only recently been ported to Unix systems (the iPhone is Unix "under the hood"). In order to work on the iPhone, it would have to be ported again; a process that is frequently error-prone and results in unstable or insecure software.

OpenSSH, on the other hand, is exactly the same source code that is used on Mac OS X platforms; and the iPhone OS is very similar to Mac OS X (in fact, compiling OpenSSH for the iPhone required only a very few minor code changes). This means that TouchTerm's SSH implementation is just as reliable as running ssh from the command-line of any Mac OS X computer. Furthermore, any time that security updates or bugfixes are incorporated into OpenSSL or OpenSSH, they can easily and immediately be folded into TouchTerm (and TouchTerm 2.0 already includes an update of this kind).

The maturity of the source code is also a significant point of differentiation. OpenSSH has been the internet standard for SSH since at least 2002. Currently, over 80% of all SSH servers on the internet use OpenSSH. (Check out this graph for an impressive visual representation of just how prevalent OpenSSH is.) Hence, OpenSSH is actively maintained (now at version 5.1), with frequent security updates/patches; PuTTY, on the other hand, is still in Beta (v0.6), and hasn't seen any kind of update since April 2007.

TouchTerm not only has the advantages of being built on the OpenSSH client, but also the entire toolkit that comes with it. This includes, for example, the ssh-keygen tool which TouchTerm uses for creating SSH keys for key-based authentication, giving the assurance that the keys generated and used will be 100% compatible with the keys you'd usually create using the OpenSSH command-line tools. If there's anything else you use in the ssh toolkit and you'd like to see it in TouchTerm, let us know! It's very likely to be easy to include.

In summary, we're proud to be using the faster, more reliable, and more secure OpenSSH core in TouchTerm. We think this translates into a real advantage for you, the user.