Citrix To Bring Millions of Windows Apps To iPhone

Anonymous writes "Citrix is putting out word that it's developing an iPhone receiver that could make 'millions' of Windows applications work on Apple's handset. (Something Citrix is calling 'Project Braeburn.') Aside from Flash and a few other apps, is anyone pining for Windows-based apps on the iPhone? (Exchange on the iPhone seems to be successful, but so does Apple's App store, which has done pretty well without Windows.)"

Already done

[jdc180]

Millions of windows apps are already available for the iphone.. it's called VNC.

Re:This may sway me to an iPhone

[cbelt3]

Bingo. While the technorati here at /. may look down their noses at it, there are a gazillion of us corporate types using Citrix (or, as we like to call it, Sh*trix), which is empirically a terminal application. So think of a terminal on the iPhone that lets you get into your entire corporate application empire.

MAJOR Business killer application. Instantly, the iPhone can become the defacto business palmtop environment. Sure, businesses will need to scale applications dependent on 1024x768 or higher screen sizes, or get used to virtual screens (imagine a virtual screen using the tilt sensors for screen panning ? Cool !).

Apple is gonna kill the Crackberry if this works.

Er...no.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is NOT "bringing Windows apps to the iPhone."

This is allowing the iPhone to connect to a Citrix server (which your company needs to buy and set up). You can then run apps directly on the server, or open a remote desktop session to a PC on the network.

The iPhone isn't RUNNING anything other than the client. And unless you run your own Citrix server (signs point to "no"), you don't have access to "millions of apps" except in theory. You have access to the apps that your company decides to put on the server, or (IF they decide to enable remote desktop) the apps they let you install on your company PC.

In other words, you're not playing Fallout on this.

And, since TFP seems unclear about this--no, this will NOT get you Flash in your web browser. And, no, Flash is NOT a Windows app.

Re:Once again...

[techprophet]

VNC is available for non-jailbroken iPhones. rdesktop I dont know about.

Re:Windows Games on your iPhone!

[larry bagina]

The iPhone uses an ARM processor. Unless you have a C&C binary compiled for Win32/ARM, WINE won't do jack shit for you.

Re:This may sway me to an iPhone

[uptownguy]

The program is called WinAdmin -- it is $11.99 -- and I bought it on my second day of owning an iPhone. Works great.

There is a lot of FUD out there about how the BlackBerry and WM phones are "business" phones ... but having owned 10+ models of PDAs/Smartphones over the last 10 years, I can honestly say that the iPhone is the best business phone I've ever owned. You just need to know what apps to download...

Cute.

[sootman]

For those who don't eat fruit, Braeburn is a kind of apple. [wikipedia.org]

Re:This may sway me to an iPhone

[222]

This will no doubt help Apple, but there has been an ICA client for Blackberry phones for awhile now. I've used it and while screensize is a PITA, its more or less functional and great in a pinch. As for us terminal geeks, MidpSSH is an order of magnitude more awesome. It proxies through the BES server eliminating the need for a VPN client, and allows me to access any Cisco or Unix server on my network, regardless of location.

Its seriously the coolest thing ever, and best of all free.

http://www.xk72.com/midpssh/ [xk72.com]

Re:And with them millions of viruses

[wastedlife]

You do know that Citrix is a Remote Desktop (Terminal Services) add-on that displays applications in their own window instead of an entire desktop? Applications run on the server, not on the iPhone. Unless the Citrix client itself is filled with holes, there is nothing that can infect the iPhone, just the Windows Server hosting Citrix and the application.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:And with them millions of viruses

[Anonymous Coward]

Not entirely true, the Citrix client has the capability of local file access, hardware access such as audio, local printer access, and a few other goodies. There are plenty of hooks into the client, if you opt to enable them.

Re:And with them millions of viruses

[The Spoonman]

While they're claiming the apps will actually run on the iPhone, they run on a back end server and are displayed on the phone. If you're familiar with Unix, think X server, but with security and compression.

Re:Citrix is near!

[absoluteflatness]

GGP was an AABA scheme.

It just used some quasi-limerick-style syllable pattern, which is why it sounds so weird.

Citrix knows
that CIO's
won't use a product
without tons of holes
Burma Shave

Still not great, as well as inaccurate, but it's closer.

Re:Windows Games on your iPhone!

[Hal_Porter]

An ARM would choke emulating an x86 anyway. In fact even if you recompiled the x86 binaries to run on Arm it would still suck because desktop class x86s like Core2 have a higher clock rate, are out of order, have big caches and fast SDRAM.

An iPhone apparently has a ARM1176JZF [engadget.com] running at ~400Mhz [macosrumors.com]. The fastest ARM a QCT Snapdragon ARM at 1Ghz [qctconnect.com] will most likely be slower than the slowest netbook class x86, an Intel Atom at 1.6Ghz.

Of course ARM uses much less power, but for single thread integer performance ARM is in a completely different class from x86.