HippoRemote Blog

Most remote control application choose to implement their own communications protocol but we opted to build on VNC instead. Why? It’s true that building on a standard gives you instant compatibility with a bunch of platforms and devices. But for us, it was a no-brainer because Macs and Linux PCs have great built-in support for VNC.

As we well know, nobody hates software more than software developers. It’s very true that the best choice of software is often no software at all. Why force our users to install yet more potentially buggy software when that functionality already exists in their computers? And relying on built-in functionality makes setup a breeze. It’s literally a handful of clicks and typing in a password.

Unfortunately, life’s not so simple on Windows. Without built-in VNC support, our users must install a third-party server. And while there are plenty of excellent options, none of them are all that easy to setup and configure.

So we created our own solution. Actually, we took our preferred VNC server (UltraVNC) and modified it, via the power of open-source software. We’re calling it HippoVNC to avoid confusion, but we’re just standing on the shoulders of the UltraVNC team.

HippoVNC is a standalone executable. We’ve already pre-configured the settings. All you have to do is download, run, and enter a password. See the setup page for the details.

We’ve also added the ability to auto-detect HippoVNC. You’ll never have to manually enter a connection again. But you will need to have iTunes installed, which I’m guessing all you iPhone and iPod Touch users do.

So to all our Windows users, switch to HippoVNC and give us your feedback! We think it simplifies things quite a bit. We hope you do too.