Review of ec2Phone or ElasticPod. Manage your EC2 instances with your iPhone

Recently I bought ec2Phone for the iPhone in order to start and manage my Amazon EC2 images.
After entering your access and secret keys you can start up an image. The secret key is still readable after entering it, which I find a bit negligent.

I was unpleasantly surprised that there is no listing functionality. You have to enter the image identifier yourself. You need another tool if you don’t have that information ready. After filling in the necessary parameters like number of instances, instance type etc., the image is started.

Starting image

After the image is started there is nothing you can do with it except shutdown or reboot. This was a bit disappointing. What surprised me more was that the next time I ran an image, the AMI id and availability zone were remembered by ec2Phone but not the number of instance or instance type. I do not understand that design decision.

Running image. Nothing to do!

Furthermore.
For some pet project I always have this workflow.

• Find image
• Start image
• Attach EBS volume
• Go to terminal to execute some scripts
• Connect browser to image

In my workflow only the start image is supported by ec2Phone. This is a bit thin. When you compare this to the (free) Firefox plugin ElasticFox it has only a small percentage of that functionality.

ElasticFox

Together with the fact that there is no support for European EC2 images I think ec2Phone/ElasticPod is just too lightweight to justify its current price.
However the developer has said that terminal integration and image listing are on the backlog for the next release. If he would add EBS support it would be a nifty iPhone app for me.

Where is 16 Horsepower?

This morning when driving to work I wanted to listen to the latest MacCast podcast by Adam Christianson. I slided my iPod in the Dension Ice>Link selected Music>Artists and Adam was first in the list……

WTF? Some of my music is deleted!!!! Where is 16 Horsepower? or 10000 maniacs which always started annoyingly when I started the motor.

This really pissed me off, some music gone. Cannot trust my iPod or iTunes.

During the day I checked my iPod again. I’m not sure why I scrolled to the end…, but there were my missing artists. It seems that the new iTunes 7.3 changed the sort order. Why? Just for the iPhone?  It seems this confused not just me as can be read in the comments on iLounge.

Bad Apple! At least ask me.