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Does the development environment have to be housed entirely on the phone itself? I ask because phones are too underpowered for most dev work. But, cloud technol
by lj3 10y ago
Does the development environment have to be housed entirely on the phone itself? I ask because phones are too underpowered for most dev work. But, cloud technology is getting to the point where you can play AAA video games remotely with low latency using a modest computer as a client.
To extend on what you have, I think it would be really cool to have a phone app that brings up a remotely-hosted triple monitor dev environment when it's docked. The actual dev server could be anywhere and all you would need to access it, both at home and at work, is the phone. Kind of like a visual tmux.
edited: removed "which is why the many attempts at making desktop docks for phones have failed". There are many reasons they have failed, but not catering to devs probably isn't one of them. :)
- protomyth 10y agoCloud is problematic because of cost of bandwidth and storage compared to local solutions. Until bandwidth is actually plentiful, uncapped, and cheap, I would rather have a local solution.
- lj3 10y agoWe're talking about a setup that's already plugged into the wall (triple monitors, keyboard, mouse). Just have the phone use Wifi. I'll admit, having a self contained setup would be nicer, but that's not going to happen until batteries get much denser or phones get a lot more efficient.
- protomyth 10y agoI'm not sure why what I plug it into cannot have its own computing and storage power. There are wired caps on data too. In fact, why the heck did Apple sell a display and an iMac? Why not insert a processor board (a blade) into the display to turn it into an iMac? Why was the Mac Pro anything more than a bunch of slots for blades? I want to carry a small display, some storage, and computing power and be able to dock it with more storage, display, and computing power. I really think we need to examine the PC in the post-PC world. Given the prices, I'm fine with the cloud being my backup, not work environment.
- lj3 10y agoHmm. That's an interesting idea. How would the phone and the PC work together, though? I could see it work if they were all the same architecture. Then you're just adding more ram and cores. Actually, the ram could be an issue. For example, say you're running a video editing program that's using 15gb of ram and you want to undock. You'd need some way of storing the state of the program and the ram its using when it's not docked. Either that or you'd be forced to shut it down completely.
- protomyth 10y agoStorage was a solved issue with the Newton Soups in the 90's, but other systems won. Memory could work the same way. Run the programs that required the high ram on the machine I docked to (using local dock storage replicating what I need from my phone) and when I unplug save the state. Perhaps back it up to network in that state in case I plug into a different dock next time.
- Jtsummers 10y agoThey wouldn't need to be the same architecture, but use a common means of communicating for coordinating tasks. There's some precedent in the design of the Transputer plus daughterboards. Borrowing from the latter to handle the heterogenous nature of phone/PC pairings. Making it hot-swappable would, of course, be a challenge. Using physical mechanisms to hold the device means that boards/phones/whatevers could be ejected safely only once various conditions (state saving, rerouting of data, etc.) were met.