Honestly, I try to write code on iOS all the time, and it's not really the absence of tools that can execute that code that really stands in the way. Instead, it's:
- The absence of a really good typing story. The 12.9 iPad Pro with smart keyboard is nice for typing text but terrible for moving the cursor around. It's agonizingly slow to do it with keyboard (highlighting is worse, for some reason) and inaccurate to do it with finger/fiddly to do it with Pencil.
The only text editor with vim keybindings (an absolute must in an environment where it's hard to move the cursor normally...) of which I'm aware is Buffer, while the only text editor with both good syntax highlighting and good github integration (via Working Copy) is Textastic. Honestly, I really wish one of those two would just buy the other so that I could have both.
- The absence of a really good ssh story. Prompt is nice, but for some reason, whenever I try to SSH into anything, there's so much latency that it is really painful to actually do anything. Maybe I just have slow network connections? But anyway, so much for just coding on a linode or something in vim.
\+1 for this. Mosh solved all problems an iPad ssh client may have. It allows the client to go offline and reconnect in no time when the client is back online, which is a common case on iOS (apps get killed when being in background for a short time). Lower latency (thanks to local echoing) and seamless switch between networks (cellular and wifi roaming) are also definitely nice to have. I tested Blink (a client on iOS with Mosh support) on a high-speed-rail trip from Shanghai to Beijing and it was rock solid.
(Although I'm a little embarrassed that I paid 20 bucks for an app in the app store that's open source. But that's totally worth it to not have to fight with xcode...)
I did a little dance around the room when I first learned about them. They were so ingrained from my Mac usage (because as that link said, they're common across any standard text box control), that I think I didn't even notice that I was using them for the first few minutes.
Does he know the two finger drag on keyboard gesture? This lets you drag the text cursor around like the keyboard is a giant trackpad - it's game-changing for typing on an iPad if you weren't aware of it before, and makes navigating text significantly better.
I agree, the one thing I was hoping for with the new 10.5" and other iPad announcements was some sort of indirect cursor input for the Smart Keyboard.
It doesn't even need to be a full trackpad, even just a nub would work - the idea is it would just be used to move the text cursor around the screen. The on-screen keyboard does it really well...but typing on the on-screen keyboard isn't great (and obstructs half the display.)
- The absence of a really good typing story. The 12.9 iPad Pro with smart keyboard is nice for typing text but terrible for moving the cursor around. It's agonizingly slow to do it with keyboard (highlighting is worse, for some reason) and inaccurate to do it with finger/fiddly to do it with Pencil.
The only text editor with vim keybindings (an absolute must in an environment where it's hard to move the cursor normally...) of which I'm aware is Buffer, while the only text editor with both good syntax highlighting and good github integration (via Working Copy) is Textastic. Honestly, I really wish one of those two would just buy the other so that I could have both.
- The absence of a really good ssh story. Prompt is nice, but for some reason, whenever I try to SSH into anything, there's so much latency that it is really painful to actually do anything. Maybe I just have slow network connections? But anyway, so much for just coding on a linode or something in vim.