Gadgetell | Tech News, Reviews, and Interesting Things

Hamachi is one of my favorite cross-platform applications/services and now they have a competitor. I remember using them back when they were pre-1.0 and when LogMeIn hadn’t bought them yet. For those of you who haven’t heard of Hamachi, it is basically an app that you install on your PC/Mac/*Nix and it allows you to create instant VPN connections, without fussing with firewalls or SSH tunnels.

(on a side note: I remember using Hamachi on my work PC about 2 years ago, to connect to my home PC, which I had turned into a proxy server, because they were blocking port 80. I surfed without my bosses knowing and it was awesome.)

Well, now Leaf Networks has entered the scene, and their application Leaf is available for Windows XP and Vista with a Linux version coming soon according to their website. Installing it is pretty much straight-forward, the same goes for creating an account.  I installed the app on my work PC and my home PC and I was able to see my files as well as view my shared iTunes library just as I was able to with Hamachi. Leaf gives you more configuration options than Hamachi, such as file-sharing permissions, but I still like how simple and easy Hamachi is, where there is no need to sign-up for an account, for example.

Leaf still is in development and it’s sort of unfair to compare to Hamachi, which was been around for 2-3 years now, but the software/service does look promising and worth keeping and eye out for.

Via [LifeHacker]