Hacker News Reader

Comment by _Codemonkeyism | Hacker News Reader

I don't want to sound arrogant, but for everyone who used a ridiculously overpowered computer - 90% of people (?) - for surfing and using Word, yes the iPad Pro is fine - or even overpowered.

Using it to develop Python looks intersting, I'd like to know more about what he does (I assume Python works fine, Webpack compile? How is the 'drive'?)

View on HN

Same. While it's near impossible these days to get many things done without an internet connection I usually like to have a full stack on localhost for convenience. I'm curious how anyone might meaningfully develop using the iPad Pro.

While I am not committed to it yet, I have found it pretty easy to move a lot of my development work to my iPad Air 2. Pythonista, Working Copy, and Textastic cover local dev/testing cycle, Blink lets me connect in to a mosh session on a cloud dev server, and with Screens I can VNC to my laptop sitting on my desk, etc. I still prefer my MBA for dedicated coding sessions, but I have been pleasantly surprised by how far you can get with just a tablet and bluetooth keyboard or keyboard case for the tablet.

Two things the iPad Pro completely replaced for me:

- TV - Wacom Tablet

For most people it is a 100% replacement for everything they do on a computer, if they get an external keyboard.

Prior to the iPad Pro, I used my iPad exclusively for a number of months thanks to remoting in to my desktop. It slowed me down a bit, but it wasn't bad and I got a lot of work done during that time.

Did you mount it when using as a TV? That could be a good solution for me.

If you're looking for an iPad mount, I recommend the Levo brand tablet floor stand. Very stable, very flexible, and can hold a 12.9" iPad Pro inside a rugged case no problem.

I use Panic Software's Coda: https://panic.com/coda/

That looks good. I use their SSH app a lot, and having an integrated coding editor looks good. I wish they would support Google cloud storage in addition to S3, but I could work around that.

I agree. It would be fine for the vast majority of people, but I can't ever see myself actually writing code on an iPad.

I write code on my on a daily basis. Coda, Swift Playgrounds, or Coda as my ssh client into a linux server and then emacs on the server. As a lightweight LTE capable environment, it's pretty amazing. It entirely depends on what you code but for web application or iOS dev it's pretty damn capable.

The iPad is very overpowerd for what most people want to do. The hardware is amazing, it's the software that's the problem.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com