Swap Your Laptop for an iPad + Linode

First of all, kudos to this guy. He's happy with his set-up. It works for him and it works for a lot of other people.

That said, I feel the need to warn others who are considering switching to a cloud-based development environment. There are some significant disadvantages to doing development on a remote machine. The biggest issue is that you are dependent on Internet connectivity. If your connection is down, you are dead in the water. If it's slow, you'll get frustrated. Connectivity is only going to get better, but the occasions when you're offline can be very memorable. Additionally, your choice of editors is rather limited. Whatever you use, it has to be terminal-based. A GUI editor like Xcode, Sublime Text 2, or Coda is right-out.

Now let's take a look at the advantages. Cost is mentioned. An iPad is $500-800. A cloud server is $20/month. A maxxed-out 11" MacBook Air is just under $1800. If you throw it away after 2 years (instead of selling it), that's $75/month. In the same time, you'd spend $40-55/month for the iPad/cloud combo. Assuming normal bay area wages, the cost difference isn't worth caring about.

The iPad/cloud setup has one big advantage: battery life. An iPad will last 10 hours. Most laptops can barely do half that. But that's pretty much its only advantage. The laptop beats it in performance, capabilities (you can run VMs and test other OSes/browsers), ergonomics, and expandability. Laptops can also output to larger monitors.

After considering all these things, the best solution is whatever you're most productive using. If you find yourself away from power often, the iPad is your best bet. If you often have slow/nonexistent Internet connectivity or you like to plug into external displays, go with a laptop.

My most productive times are when I'm offline, so my weapon of choice is the 11" MacBook Air. I load it up with the right documentation and virtual machines beforehand. Then I spend the next 5-7 hours writing prodigious amounts of code. At that point both myself and the Air's battery are spent.

Again, I don't mean to imply that the author is mistaken. I simply want to manage expectations for anyone considering following him.

The 11" Air weighs 100 grams (10%) more than iPad + wireless keyboard and for that 10% you get much higher effective resolution, no compromise keyboard and trackpad, option to connect external monitor, up to 128gb storage, USB, etc, etc. Why compromise?

I find it interesting to contrast this ubiquitous-connectivity model with the development style of Joey Hess (git-annex, et al) modeled on extremely sporadic connectedness.

Not a comment on which is better. We're in a world of ubiquity. I've worked for months at a time in a purely remote-connection style. But speaking purely as a child of the modem, you can pry my local processing power from my cold, dead system chassis.

Swap your laptop for a chromebook + ec2

Previously discussed at: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3186476

One point I'm not sure this article mentions is how gracefully you can switch between apps on the iPad with gestures. I do a lot of (non-development) work via Prompt and when I need to consult documentation I just swipe over to a PDF or web page. Not being able to see the two side-by-side is almost a blessing simply because when I switch over I read the documentation carefully and only switch back when I'm ready to actually resume my work. This helps me out a lot because instead of skimming the documentation as I go I actually spend a few minutes reading it all and absorbing it. When I'm ready to switch back to my work I'm less scatterbrained about what I'm trying to accomplish. I'm way less prone to skimming the documentation just for the relevant parts. I'm starting to think uni-windowing is way underrated. When I work on my Mac I often do the same thing with full-screen apps now. I feel like it's made me more productive.

The one feature I really need added to iOS is a multi-item/history based clipboard system. This would make working between apps in a uni-window environment much easier.

Yes swap my 129GBP ThinkPad T61 running debian for a more expensive, less capable device with a pissy screen that falls over if you let go of it, rubbish keyboard, short shelf life, non replaceable battery, subscription based, lock in promoting glorified vt100 terminal that only works if you have an internet connection available.

I can't take this working methodology seriously, nor anything which contracts out every last egg to one basket. It's trendy but entirely batshit.

Ignoring the cost model which is broken, if all shit breaks loose, which it does in real life regularly then this is just going to screw you properly then.

I recommend creating a reusable 'development vm' (or lxc container if you swing that way) for your entire team. It really cuts down on development time and you can generally host it anywhere (locally, 'the cloud', whatever).

Not(or rarely) having to ponder 'is it my environment?' whenever something breaks is nice. It's also usually easy to share the folder and work on a remote vm's filesystem locally with whatever editor you like. (some exceptions are java+eclipse because of the need for a shared maven repo and general eclipse slowness is compounded in this type of setup)

Something I'm surprised I haven't seen mentioned so far is a comment regarding this:

> The hardest part of setting up an SSH client on a tablet is getting your private SSH key on there without entrusting it to a third party. I split mine across multiple services and removed it after recombining it, but a better way would be to SSH in with a password first, then use copy and paste to copy the key inside iSSH itself.

Ideally, you shouldn't be transferring a private key in the first place, and instead, generating a new private key on the tablet itself, specifically for the tablet.

Once you've generated a private key for the tablet, it's trivial to push the public key for it to the server (and safe to entrust the public key to third parties, since it's specifically intended to be public).

It also means that if, say, your tablet got stolen, you could just revoke access for the tablet's key, rather than having to redo everything for your existing key.

There is no reason to force yourself to one solution.

I have access to this setup, but also to multiple laptops, desktops, tablets, phones. I use what works for the situation.

When does the ipad+keyboard shine?

When you don't have easy access to wifi, but can get 3g.

When you don't have power. iPad battery life is awesome.

When you want to have a tablet with you for reading, drawing, notating.

When you want your keyboard to be detached from your screen to have a more comfortable position. (e.g. you can put the keyboard on your lap, or even offset the screen while having the keyboard in front of you. Many possible configurations)

When you want the above features, but don't want to have to carry a backpack or some kind of bulky bag to fit a laptop or convertible laptop+tablet or carry around a few different devices.

The iPad is a very general purpose device. A lot of people are saying, "Just use a laptop" and completely missing the point. The author is specifically using this setup for 3g+battery life.

If you're going to go full cloud, a tablet like the Asus Transformer seems like a much better fit than the iPad.

It has a few key advantages:

1. it has a physical keyboard/trackpad dock which the OS fully understands.

2. the dock contains no actual PC, and is 99% battery, effectively doubling your battery-time.

Why would you chose an iPad over this?

While this might be working for the author, I couldn't take this approach, since there is just too much compromises I'd have to take.

Being a Rails developer, I have to constantly run tests, refresh browser and write code, and to do this as efficiently as possible, I'm using dual monitor setup with the guard gem, which makes two things while I write code: runs tests and refreshes browser (both appear on second monitor). The machine is slightly customized Mac Mini Server (SSD + additional RAM) which also comes around $1000 plus the two monitors.

Laptops are simply not fit for any serious Rails development, not only to the small amount of screen real estate, computing power but also because I can rarely get into the zone outside my home office.

I couldn't live without AWS or my litte VPS. As a developer and fellow HN fan, I'm always reading about the latest frameworks and projects. I love demoing them, but I feel it's risky on my laptop because the 500GB I have fills up quick if I'm not paying attention, so I avoid installing anything unless it's going to be used with a real project at work. I do my best to run all examples on AWS or my VPS first, the reason for this is so if ruby blows up or my recently configured kernel panics, I can easily reset or reinstall the instance and we're back in business.

While I do believe the future is in cloud based development, I think right now's solution is a duality of the two.

I'm waiting for the Android port of Emacs to mature. It currently has issues with hardware keyboards and with Tramp. But once it works well, then I'm getting a Nexus 10 and a Logitech K810[1]

Emacs-TRAMP will let me edit files locally so it will work well even if you're in a location with spotty internet.

1: http://www.androidpolice.com/2012/11/27/logitech-bluetooth-i...

Oh, cmon, let's check the inventory: - tablet - wireless keyboard

Right, I stopped reading after that. So he has a "small laptop" which is what the ipad+keyboard is and a vps.

Soon, a tablet will be fast enough to compile locally. But the article's setup still has the benefit of someone else managing OS/backups.

Is is possible to have both? i.e. a "remotely managed local system". (1) auto-updated OS e.g. chrome; (2) auto-backup e.g. dropbox.

But how do people connect their Model Ms to their iPads?

I've read a few posts on various sites about Ubuntu running on jailbroken iPads, if it's a full Ubuntu experience I'd love to do that.

Hehehe, how about NO?

Glad to see this article made it into Linux Journal!

But I just bought a new mechanical keyboard!

The sad thing is, the Nexus 7 and Nexus 10 could be full powered Linux tablets (the Nexus 10's SOC is used in numerous places with Linux). Put that in a keyboard dock or something like the Transformer Prime dock...

ARM linux is more than great in my opinion, battery life, tablet-when-you-want, laptop the other times.

Plus, you know, the Nexus 10 is cheap and has a gorgeous screen.