Feeling Friction With the iPad

I'm starting to feel a little friction with the iPad again.

Specifically for one use case, software development.

I wrote recently about one solution for that, which was to use GitHub Codespaces to run a remote version of Visual Studio Code. Which admittedly, is a pretty great solution. As you an keep your environment consistent across devices, and also lets you run/debug your project live. The only problem, is that it obviously requires an internet connection.

There are apps for the iPad, which you can use to write code. The one I've used most for this has been Textastic. But while it's a good editor, you can't actually run your code.

Recently, I started looking into Ruby on Rails. And the little learning I've done has all been on my Mac. Simply because I wanted to capture the excitement of learning something new, instead of spending time working out how it would be possible to do it elsewhere.

I have since looked into how I'd write (and run) Ruby on the iPad. The first part seems easy, as there are a few editor apps that I could use. But running Ruby projects locally on an iPad seems impossible.

In my mind, there are three different situations I could be in. I could have full internet access, local network access, or be completely offline.

Ideally, you'd have a single solution that wouldn't be affected by these situations. For example, if I use Neovim to code, while I wouldn't be able to download new plugins, I could code and run projects locally on my machine without any issues if I had no network access.

However, it appears that because of the iPad's limitations. If you want to run code, you need to run it somewhere else.

If you have full internet access, something like Codespaces seems like a great way to go.

If you only have access to a local network, you could always have another computer, where you could use something like a remote desktop tool, or ssh, to run your code on that machine.

But if you don't have any internet, the only solution I can find is to carry a Raspberry Pi with your iPad.

That may sound clever, and I'm sure part of me would enjoy setting this up, and having a miniature Linux machine accessible from my iPad. But it's not right.

I don't want to be too dramatic, or overly negative, but if you spend over a thousand pounds buying a computer. One which has the same internals as some reasonably powerful MacBooks. You probably wouldn't expect to need to carry a little Raspberry Pi with you, so you can do some "real" computing.

Clearly, the iPad not being able to do this type of work is a product decision. The underlying hardware could quite easily handle running a small Rails site and SQLite database locally.

It's not even if other developers could make better software for the iPad, as there are various App Store rules that restrict the downloading, compilation, and running of code.

Maybe I expected too much. These limitations aren't exactly new. I just thought by now, there would be some kind of solution for software development on the iPad.

As for the other things I use my iPad for - reading, writing, playing games, entertainment, it's great. I'm just stuck at this last hurdle.

While there is a sense of negativity with the iPad from myself at the moment, there is another computer that is giving me some enjoyment.

It's my trusty ThinkPad (X1 Carbon 5th gen.) which is running DHH's Omarchy. As the site says, it's an "opinionated Arch and Hyprland setup".

I've ran Arch and Hyprland on various machines over the past. But I've never really made it to a point where I have some kind of finished system. The benefit of Omarchy is that you get to fast-forward 50 hours or so into the Linux experience.

Sure, you may want to configure your own dotfiles for certain tools, or spend hours customising how things look. But at least you get the skip the boring parts about making sure you have a network manager, have basic volume and brightness controls, and configuring some kind of menu bar with useful information.

I won't talk about this too much, as I'm sure people reading this will probably be here hoping to read about my iPad journey, not Linux. (unless...?)