It's great to see tools like this start to emerge on iOS but the new 11" MBA is only slightly more trouble to lug around but is infinitely more useful as a development tool than I suspect a tablet will ever be.
I bought the iPad 2 the day it came out and was thrilled to use it for about two months.
But over the last four, I've realized: the reason I keep coming back to computers is that I enjoy computers. Learning more about their internals, harnessing that for my own ends, creating solutions to real problems I have, without frameworks or IDEs or buzzwords. I don't so much care for anything about the iPad but iBooks.
I bought the Macbook Air when Apple upgraded it, and now I carry it with me everywhere. There's plenty I can do on it, even without a network connection (i.e., all my coding), and I really feel attached to my featherweight computer.
Mobile coding is really fulfilling, yes. But I will never want to code by touch typing. Since buying the MBA, I haven't once thought about touching the iPad. And I don't see that changing.
Good for your adult self. If I was an upper-middle-class 10 year old kid who couldn't afford a nice computer, but could coax my parents into buying an iPad over a game console, I'd be so thrilled to have something that guided me into developing fun little games.
When I was 10-12, I had a freaking AIX PowerPC machine because my dad could get one easily. Did I learn programming with such a fancy machine? absolutely not, I ended up just installing windows NT on it so I could record and play with sounds.
A very good point, and I don't disagree with you. I used RPGEditor and GameEditor when I was a kid and couldn't figure out how to use plain C++ to build a game.
The authors of this software have done a really amazing job, that's undeniable.
But I'm thinking here about two things:
- There is a notion that the only thing stopping tablets from overtaking computers is the fact that you can't develop software on tablets. Under that model of the world, this is a major breakthrough for tablets. But I'm not sure it actually solves the problem of high-quality development.
- There is also a notion that the iPad is a distillation of the best parts of a computer, the things that give people joy, and it removes "cruft" that people don't want to think about: filesystems, command line access, and the like. I wanted to take this opportunity to say that this isn't the case for a lot of people and that the ability to code on an iPad doesn't mean the iPad can give as much joy to a developer as a real computer can.
My comment was less manifesto, more musing about why I can't get rid of real computers.
true. I haven't bought a tablet yet, but the two main uses I as an adult have when I get one will be :
1) let me read books (i've been getting rid of most/all the physical books i own because of tablets, and reading them on a laptop doesn't feel the same).
2) act as a second 'travel' monitor for my laptop.
the biggest issue with tablets is the lack of a compiler and the processing power. With cloud computing and technologies like dropbox, developers can queue their apps and get it to compile on machine with grunt, package it and upload it to testflight and then download it to the mobile devices again... and test it.
I think the bigger issues are the coarse resolution of the touch interface and lack of usable keyboard. The former prevents the kind of dense, widget-rich UIs you need for a tool as complex as a real IDE. The latter can be ameliorated with an external keyboard but then you've got a combination that's actually more awkward and less portable than a laptop.
To try replace a laptop with a tablet (or vice-versa) is to misunderstand the strengths and limitations of each, IMO.
I jumped into iOS development earlier this year but I feel like a cheat when I almost always go back to my MBA to do anything other than read in Kindle/iBooks. To be honest I'd much rather be writing native Mac OS X apps but the bulk of new development work seems to be on iOS these days.
As the other responder said, Apple has kind of disrupted its own market by making such polished and portable laptops.
I'm sticking to my keyboard for near-future development as well, but I hope some more people explore in this direction. It'd be really cool to see this program or similar ones evolve. Maybe one day, I might be able to code high level programming structures with gestures.
There is more than portability to consider. I find the iPad is easier to use for programming in awkward places. But maybe I'm the only one that does crazy things like write code from the tractor while I'm out in the middle of a field.
It's all part of progress. Your MBA wasn't around too long ago.
I have big hopes for touch-enabled development on tablets. I see a world where we can use conventional dev tools with tablets that augment the experience.
I would love to just have the ability to navigate my project files with the codify-like nav and have my desktop IDE take notice.
I think tablets can be very useful as accessories. For instance, an iPad makes a great, general purpose MIDI controller for making music, but is currently a long, long way from threatening a laptop as a serious music production tool.
One iPad may be a long way from threatening a laptop for music-making, but 3 (or 4 ..) iPads goes a long way to absolutely annihilating laptops as a comfortable, enjoyable, extraordinarily creative way to make music.
I say this as I sit here with an iPhone4, an iPad, and an iPad2 right in front of me, each with their own amazing music-making software onboard, having a blast .. iMS20 on iPad, BeatMaker on iPad2, animoog on iPhone4. No laptop can give me such a pleasant experience, period.
What do you do for recording? The instant save & recall and trouble-free rendering of a laptop running Live is hard to beat. I haven't been rich enough to try a 4-iPad rig yet.
I do have one iPad synth on the app store though (GrainBender) and I'm working on a new music app for the iPad right now so I'm definitely invested in seeing this market develop.
I record directly into my Linux DAW (Ardour) through a Presonus Firepod. I don't do "recall and play", I do more "play and play" style music-making, for me the patch recall is not ever as useful as the dynamic process of building new stuff live, so it hasn't been an issue personally - but there is definitely technology in the iOS Music-making sphere that will make this brain-dead seamless and simple soon enough.
I will check out GrainBender - I've got a huge collection of these apps - and add it to the collection. I'm currently working on my own MIDI sequencing engine/workspace product for iPad too - definitely, its an exciting platform for which to be making music tools.
Just wanted to let you know I've checked out GrainBender, bought it, and will use it at my bands next Jam session for some inspiration and music love .. nice work, very well done!
For sure. It's going to take time. I'm more excited about the short term where we can actually use them as development accessories. For me, that'd be enough.
My MBP replacement sits in a box still brand new, I do not use it as I work on the iMac or the iPad. Recently I had been carrying my iPad interstate, when I carried my MBP 15" again, it was almost like breaking my back with a sack full of rocks.
