Fourteen years ago the first iPad came out and ever since that day, random venture capitalist startup flipper men have claimed it is a magical all-in-one wonder machine that was able to replace every regular computer. It still has not happened.
Having a wireless keyboard and mouse is going to help a lot. When a mouse is connected to the iPad you get a cursor and everything. If the iPad is sitting next to a Mac, you can use your Mac's mouse on the iPad by bashing your cursor on the edge of the screen in the direction of the iPad. If you remain persistent, eventually, the cursor will kinda just melt over from the Mac to the iPad. Not trolling you, that is literally how it eventually works.
The Magic Keyboard is not a case. It is a stand. I say that, because it cannot be folded all the way back on itself so you can use the iPad in "Tablet Mode" - instead the Magic Keyboard only articulates to the point of using the iPad to emulate a laptop lid. It is a very sturdy stand/case, and if you only intend to use it in "Laptop Mode" then it is an excellent, albeit stupidly expensive accessory. I like the keys on it better than I like the keyboard on the actual Macbook Air, they just feel a little nicer. The touchpad is decent too.
This thing uses the battery a lot faster than expected. After 4 hours of no power I'd be starting to sweat hard, at about twice the burn rate as the Macbook Air. Part of that might be from the Magic Keyboard, because the iPad powers it and even lights the keys up. But according to iOS, Safari is pretty chewy.
Battery usage from the past hour of writing this blog post.
The programming editor scene is sad still. It was surprising to me that there is no real XCode or no real VSCode for the iPad yet. Most of this seems to come down to Apple's stupid app store rules and fees. There are only a small handful of actual viable choices to get real work done, and none of them are names you've heard of. The rest are just noise in the app store. Anything that could not fit the following requirements was ignored.
- No In-App purchases. It must be Free for real, or Pay and done.
- No Subscription. If it costs must it must be one and done until the next major version release.
- If it looks like an existing editor, it should be from the existing dev. No third party VS Code knockoffs.
- SSH terminal and file transfer.
- PublicKey authentication.
Textastic ($9.99) - It has the settings you need to settle in... but the transfer UI is the worst I've seen since like FireFTP in 2002. It seemed to be impossible to connect to a project over SSH and just have a sidebar of files to tap and edit. Have to transfer the files locally and back manually.
Koder (Free) - This one is lighter weight on customisation, and the SSH connection only worked one time for me and then never again.
GoCoEdit ($8.99) - This is where I ended up for now. High level I would say it gives me Sublime Text 2 vibes. It has enough settings to customize, but its missing a few that I highly value like trimming white space from the end of lines automatically. However, the SSH connection works reliably and it has a proper sidebar you can just open files out of. What really sealed the deal though was it is the only one I've encountered so far that allowed you to do fully custom syntax themes and snippets.
This editor's biggest problem for me is you cannot re-order the remote connections later. And the order they are in right now is not even the order I made them in so IDK what they are doing in there.
I spent about 2 hours at three a.m., manually creating a theme that is almost Synthwave '84.
I have yet to find a good Database/SQL tool for iPad. But I also have yet to find one for Mac OS. The only good database tool for dealing with MySQL/MariaDB on the entire planet seems to be HeidiSQL which is a Windows application.
You still cannot right click "Inspect Element" or properly clear cache on iOS browsers. Had to jump back to my PC to test a fix to my post editor just to finish this post because it refused to download the updated .js file from the server no matter what I did or how loudly I swore at it.
Honestly the complete lack of any dev tools in the browsers on mobile platforms is the biggest thing holding me back from caring about them.
Remote Desktop app for Windows (Free) - now as of this month now called "Windows App" works well if you need to remote Desktop to a Windows computer. There is some gatchas with it though mostly I have found to do with Adobe software because Adobe is Adobe. For example, Remote Desktop from Mac to Windows everything is fine. In AfterEffects, the B key will trim a composition start point to where the cursor is. However hitting B like normal from the iPad version nothing happens in AfterEffects, despite the fact if you alt-tab to Discord you can see the B key is working just fine by complaining to your friends about how Adobe is the worst.
Mac - the latest version of Mac OS if you long-click the green button you can "Send to iPad" a window which will extend your Mac desktop turning the iPad into a second monitor. I have yet to figure out how to do this in reverse order, initializing it from the iPad. Also, Mac's remote desktop appears to be based on VNC, so no matter which client you use, it runs like ass and is not enjoyable or even usable to get work done, even if the machines are sitting side by side.
NoMachine (Free for Personal) - If you need cross platform remote desktop this is my favourite choice. I am currently using it on every non-Windows computer I have (Linux, Mac, iPhone, iPad). The RDP built into Windows is too good so I don't bother with it there.
Moonlight (Freeish) - Requires the endpoint be NVIDIA and that you have gone through the hassle of pairing NVIDIA Shield with the Moonlight client. Works by streaming your desktop as video so it is network intense. Mostly used for video games, but it has a remote desktop mode as well.
Photoshop (Not Free, IDK, I Get It Thru Work) - The current software "Photoshop" is good for quick things, it is slowly becoming more like the real desktop Photoshop. Still missing most of the really good features but it is more capable now. I could get most anything a web dev could need done with it. An example of a thing missing is I am pretty sure... Gaussian Blur. And everything regarding Smart branded anything.
Affinity Photo 2 (Also Not Free) - A much more feature full app. It is more oriented towards drawing. Not spent much time with it, because I get it for free via our Canva account, which we get from some other means, and this app has an annoying auth chain that must be walked every time you launch it.
If I was in a hurry and only allowed to grab one thing and I accidentally grabbed the iPad instead of my real computer, it would not be the worst possible situation as long as I only had to fix code. This is still not a good platform for a system architect or doing any serious devopsing.
Using remote desktop solutions such that the iPad is just a dumb terminal will get you a lot farther. Like if I am out of town and get an emergency developer call, I will very likely be remoting into one of my two main real computers with their full tool kits, not trying to limp around directly on the iPad's local software library.
Windows 11 is hot garbage. The current MacOS you have to use an undocumented terminal command to unlock a GUI setting to be allowed to install a program Apple did not bless, so that is likely to vanish soon. Seems like at this point my game computer will stay Windows 10 until they stop making games for it, and my next developer workstation will probably be going back to Linux. The iPad is neat and it helps me deal with my harem of Apple fangirls but in terms of a developer workstation, nope it is not there yet. Maybe another 14 years.