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iPad Pro as Development Machine

arslan.io

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Re: iPad Pro as Development Machine

#31

Post by kayoone »

I still prefer using my Laptop in most cases, connect it to a nice big 4K screen at home and the office. I also love my iPad for the usecases it is great at, like taking notes and casual browsing/reading but i would not want to use one device for all. If you do that, a Surface Pro is arguably the better choice.

A lot of apps offer seamless syncing which makes using multiple devices really easy. I can throw PDFs on my iPad via Airdrop, annotate them with the Pencil in Notability and see the changes synced immediately back to my Macbook with Notabilitys icloud sync.

Re: iPad Pro as Development Machine

#32

Post by zed88 »

Apple missed the boat on a tablet running macOS. It's pointless to even try and fill the gap created by their mistake. Because when I boot my device, I want to get to work ASAP rather than configuring 10 things.

Re: iPad Pro as Development Machine

#34

Post by alpaca128 »

maxxxxx wrote: post #16
0815test wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows 10... a full-fledged OS? Mind you, there are tablets/convertibles that can support a full-fledged OS with relative ease. I just don't think the Surface is one of them, unless you're willing to wait until the hacks that are involved in making it work under Linux are included in the kernel mainline, and thus in distros. The SP 3 is there now, possibly the 4 as well. But what's the point when you can just pick s…

The Surface Pros are full fledged machines and quite powerful if bought with the right spec (not cheap though). Just get the keyboard cover. No idea how they work with Linux though.

> No idea how they work with Linux though.

On the Surface Pro 1 you can forget using the pen input and sometimes the wifi will just disconnect until you reboot. Aside from that Linux will run pretty smoothly.

From what I've read so far I get the impression it works better on the newer models though(SP3 and up).

Re: iPad Pro as Development Machine

#36

Post by a-saleh »

laurentdc wrote: post #8

This topic comes up every month or so, and there's always this catch: > we need to first create a remote workstation which we can start using as our main development machine. A dumb terminal isn't a development machine. That's like saying "Using my DEC VT100 terminal to develop in Go", let me just hook it up to an actual computer

For me, it 80% is. But I am the kind of a person, who edits his .git/config in VS Code through vim in the embedded terminal :)

Re: iPad Pro as Development Machine

#38

Post by lordleft »

farslan wrote: post #29
vlunkr wrote: post #23

Everyone is so defensive about laptops here that you’d think they feel threatened by this post. Isn’t it in the spirit of the hacker community to be open to new modes of using computers? This is an experiment, that’s why they documented it and stated clearly that it’s an experiment. It’s something to think about and discuss, not a statement that you should throw your laptop out.

OP here: Thanks for the comment. I thought I was clear that this was an experiment and that I wanted to try out things. Now that I'm using it for couple of months, I have even more things to share that are not covered by my blog post.

Thanks for the article - as a developer with an iPad Pro, it was fun reading your thoughts. I haven't tried coding on it, but I love it as a supplementary machine.

Re: iPad Pro as Development Machine

#39

Post by BinaryIdiot »

rocky1138 wrote: post #10
coppolaemilio wrote: post #2

Too much configuration to even get started!! and the fact that you can't work offline makes this setup so much worse than a regular laptop for my regular use :( I wish there was a better dev environment on the ipad already

Why do you wish that? It sounds horrible. Why not just use a laptop (the right tool for the job).

It sounds horrible because, right now, it is horrible. But if someone enjoys the form factor it could likely be made not / less horrible. I mean ultimately it has most of the hardware of a laptop, minus the keyboard. There is no reason development couldn't be made at least decent on it.

I don't imagine ever wanting to give up my laptop for such a development environment but I could see myself using it when traveling to tinker / test out things or maybe making emergency / urgent changes.

Re: iPad Pro as Development Machine

#40

Post by forrestthewoods »

laurentdc wrote: post #8

This topic comes up every month or so, and there's always this catch: > we need to first create a remote workstation which we can start using as our main development machine. A dumb terminal isn't a development machine. That's like saying "Using my DEC VT100 terminal to develop in Go", let me just hook it up to an actual computer

I came here to say the same thing. This article got me all excited. I made my coffee and sat down for the long read. And the first damn section killed all my excitement.

It drives me god damn bonkers that the iPad is such an unbelievably powerful piece of hardware... that is practically unusable due to arbitrary OS limitations. Unusable for certain types of tasks that is.

Le sigh.

I dream of the day when an iPad can dual boot iOS and OSX.

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