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0 pointsbrigandish5y ago0 comments

I was curious so went to the Blink website and I am very confused. The initial strapline is enticing, "Connect to your cloud on the go, or code all day from the beach." so I read more:

> With Mosh and SSH, Blink is rock-solid, fast, and your all-day-long companion.

Okay, it's starting to get crowded but I want to know more so I scroll down to get some details:

> Mosh was built for constant mobile connectivity.

Isn't this the Blink site? Or is it also called Mosh? Why am I getting the history of an app/service/Lord-knows-what before being told what it is?

> You can flawlessly jump from home, to the train, and then to the office thanks to Mosh.

Still on about Mosh and not only is there not a peep about what it is, I still don't know what Blink is.

> Blink is rock-solid connected all the way.

Now we're back to Blink. What is it? Doesn't matter, it's good! Trust us, the people who won't tell you what it is. What is Mosh? Who knows!

If I guess that Blink is a shell and Mosh is some kind of networking facility will I a) be correct, and b) have guessed more detail about them in a few words than their home page tells me?

Disappointing.

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4 comments · 2 top-level

monkin5y ago· 2 in thread

The only thing disappointing here is your comment about ONE block on the whole page that talks about connectivity, and you present it as a complete website. The website itself maybe is little outdated but does a great job telling what Blink does and what tech it uses to make your life easier.

brigandishOP5y ago

There's nothing on that whole page that addresses my complaints, why do you think I'm going to spend time delving into the rest of the site when the writers of that page clearly don't care about wasting my time?

- Tell me what it is

- Tell me why it exists

- Stop with the ad copy and buzzwords until the first 2 points have been addressed

That's what I want from a landing page / home page.

LucidLynx5y ago

> - Tell me what it is

"THE PRO TERMINAL FOR iOS & iPadOS", from the front page.

> - Tell me why it exists

" You bought the latest Pro device, loved it, and then you wondered...

…Can I use it to replace my laptop?

Yes, you can

Blink was built as the tool we wanted to use all day. We were tired of User Interfaces being on our way, and of connections that couldn’t even last for 5 minutes... ", from the front page too.

> - Stop with the ad copy and buzzwords until the first 2 points have been addressed

They have been.

1 more reply

rogerbinns5y ago

Blink is a terminal emulator and shell with a command line style interface (vs pointy clicky gui). It has numerous commands built-in that the shell can execute. If you are familiar with busybox then it is very much like that.

The most useful is ssh, which works as you expect (blink has code to manage keys etc). But iOS/iPadOS also terminates non-foreground apps. For example you could switch from blink to a massive web page in your browser, and then switch back again and blink would be relaunched. mosh is a connection-less protocol (setup is done over ssh first though), so you can keep sessions going across blink being killed and restarted, and even if you change IP address! I personally use tmux so this doesn't matter.

The shell commands are useful too. For example you can access iCloud files (available on every device) and local iOS files. You can do network diagnostics (ping, dig, nc etc). You can scp/sftp files back and forth. And then you can operate on them using sed/awk/grep etc.

It is quite challenging to explain all this, as you noticed at the web site. An example of a more GUI style ssh client is https://www.panic.com/prompt/ and they deal with keeping connections described here https://library.panic.com/general/ios-background/

There is a general command line with multiple commands built in at https://libterm.app/ and Blink is built on that. Note that you can even do things like compile code with clang, but the resulting "executables" are interpreted and not native code (again due to iOS policies).

Another alternative is https://ish.app/ which runs Alpine Linux userspace and interprets x86 instructions.

In short an iOS/iPadOS ssh client is more complicated than you'd expect, and they all have varying degrees of workarounds for app permissions, termination, maintaining connections in the background, etc. The blink site tells you more about one of those solutions (mosh) than describing the problem it addresses in the first place.

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