Hacker News Reader

Comment by 0xADEADBEE | Hacker News Reader

I'm struggling to work out why anyone would want to do this. Leaving aside the other concerns, I personally find input via touchscreen pretty painful and can't imagine being able to program at any real speed. It's entirely possible I'm missing something though!

View on HN

I have the attachable keyboard stand that sits comfortably on my knee when I'm on the train. I can type as fast on that as I can a laptop. Honestly with a half decent IDE/dev toolchain it would be a fantastic little lightweight setup for coding.

I imagine if you coupled that with a stand of some sort, it'd be pretty close to a netbook or something. Thank you so much for the insight!

The A series processors inside the iPad Pros are significantly faster than the Atom processors inside netbooks.

I’m able to get an absurd amount banged out with just my thumbs. I’ve taken comprehensive meeting notes this way. Possibly the reason to do it for coding would be the ability to code from anywhere for quite a while on battery/cell. Mosh does not take up much bandwidth or power.

As an example, I worked on some professional projects over mosh on my iPhone to my home network from work. My job at the time made a lot of time demands on me, but I had already mastered whatever professional growth I could in that position - so I took to setting up and learning tech that way.

This is fascinating - thank you so much for replying. I used to have input speed back when we had physical buttons on phones but with the advent of touch-screens, that has deteriorated for me. I hadn't considered how useful it would be to have when a small laptop isn't available. Another commenter mentioned working on a train; I can certainly see the use-case. Thanks for the insight!

Do you use swype gestures? The improvement for me was big.

>I'm struggling to work out why anyone would want to do this.

The same reasons why ipads are always shoe horned into a role beyond content consumption.

iPads with a keyboard are awesome at communication tasks such as email, IM, and A/V calls. Some advantages of iPads over laptops for these tasks.

* Laptops go to sleep when not plugged in or being interacted with. The iPad can provide sound notifications all day on battery power.

* LTE means that the communication lines are always open

* Almost everyone treats iOS apps as first class citizens. Skype on macOS is often buggy. Linux often has outdated clients.

* Instant power on

* Longer battery life

* Notifications appear even when the app is not running.

* A really sane operating system update schedule and procedure.

* A really sane app update procedure.

I'd say coding using just a touchscreen would be terrible, but keep in mind that tablets aren't limited to just the touchscreen. In fact, you can plug a full-sized mechanical keyboard into an iPad (though the more common keyboard is likely the smartcover.

I got the Bluetooth kinesis for just this reason. It’s ergonomic. You can pair it with up to 3 devices and switch between them with a key combo.

> I'd say coding using just a touchscreen would be terrible

Text-based coding, sure. But the jury is still out for visual programming systems, of either the Scratch (syntax expressed via custom "puzzle pieces") or the LabVIEW (flow-based semantics) kind.

How is the jury still out given that nobody uses anything like this for anything real beyond learning and labview dates back to 1983 and scratch to the early 2000s.

Language is the means by which human beings describe abstract data in a dense concise easy to encode and decode fashion. This is true whether its spoken or written. That it is the means we express code is unsurprising.

Lets put it another way. I'm typing this response to you on a keyboard. Can you imagine a way via drawing a picture that I could have in moments conveyed these thoughts by drawing you a picture?

See figure 1?

> But the jury is still out for visual programming systems

How many more decades of failure do we need before we decide the jury is in and visual programming is a dead end?

There are actually a number of highly successful visual programming tools. They are just hidden underneath the veneer of something else.

https://www.alteryx.com/products/alteryx-platform/alteryx-de...

Agreed. Basically all my programming is backend / CLI projects. I'd almost certainly have had a different result if I'd tried writing frontend (especially native) apps from an iPad

> I personally find input via touchscreen pretty painful and can't imagine being able to program at any real speed

With Logitech Create Pro keyboard on iPad 12.9, it is comparable to a laptop. 4:3 HiDPI screen has more vertical space than 16:9 laptops. Arm processor means instant on, long battery life, fanless/silent, fast charging and never gets hot in your lap. The web browser is faster (by feel and benchmark) than some x86 devices.

Git is available locally (Working Copy) and some apps support in-place editing across apps.

Hopefully Apple makes it possible to run Jekyll and other static web servers on iOS.

I think the parent means that x86 devices, specifically a favorite of mine, the Surface Pro, can provide mostly all of that and then some, but without the hassle of iOS:

* 3:2 screen ratio, 267 PPI

* Despite an i5 it has instant on, connected standby, LTE built in

* 9h of web browsing on battery: https://www.anandtech.com/show/13471/the-microsoft-surface-p...

* Fanless

* Charges in 2h40m

* Does not get hot

* Can run everything from games to servers to IDEs to scripts

* Not a walled garden

I carry all 3 (iPad Pro, MacBook Pro, Surface Pro) with me (work reasons), but the Surface hardly gets used as it is inferior to the iPad as a tablet and as a computer to the MacBook. I'm interested in moving to VDI based on the iPad when roaming, but I want to move to the 12" first since my Horizon View desktop feels a bit tight on the smaller one.

Do you know if it can run Windows 10 LTSB? The telemetry on regular Windows 10 is a deterrent.

x86 is x86, so I can't think of any reason why it wouldn't?

Echoing others, I use a physical keyboard. Unfortunately I'm limited to the smart keyboard cover Apple sells, mostly because I'm too cheap or lazy to buy a better one, but much better ones do exist.

Since the new iPads Pro have USB-C connections, one can just plug any old keyboard in and it works fine.

I've done this on occasion with my Ergodox, it's quite comfortable. Granted, I mostly use the iPad for tasks which are more suited to the Pencil, but it's there if one wants it.

They do make external keyboards for the iPad, for what it is worth.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com