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Very interesting, but I can't help but wonder: are developers really interested in working on an iPad? I feel like this is exactly the kind of job where a lapto

• Closi 2y ago
  The use-case I can probably see more is schools. Lots of schools give all their students ipads. Also lots of kids have iPads but not laptops (my girlfriend's daughter does not have a laptop that could do Godot development, but has an iPad). My assumption is it's more about introducing people to development than professional developers moving to iPad.
• TeaDude 2y ago
  Kids, I'd suspect. More and more of them are stuck exclusively on tablets. From what I can tell, there isn't even a version of Roblox Studio available. Scratch seems to work though.
  • pcdoodle 2y ago
    That's a shame. Having a "project" is what kicks off learning the cool bits about computers. If you can't do it with the devices we're giving kids, we are robbing our future inventors.
    • al_borland 2y ago
      We’re also making less capable employees. I’ve noticed most of the people we hire these days for dev roles have no idea how computers or operating systems work. I’ll have someone with a pretty impressive title reach out to me with a basic OS question, and I wonder how they got to where they are without this foundational knowledge. Most of this stuff I learned on my own when I got my first computer.
      • baq 2y ago
        There are people here on this forum openly admitting they don’t see how ‘knowing Linux’ is useful, so no point actually learning it. I have no idea if they really never learn and wing it until they become managers or become great cloud engineers who simply scale up instead of running strace.
        • al_borland 2y ago
          I don’t know how someone uses modern dev tools without understanding some very basics of the Linux CLI. I see this all the time. If a command in some documentation isn’t a straight copy/paste, they’re done for.
          • dagmx 2y ago
            Knowing Linux is different than knowing how to use a CLI. I dislike that the two are conflated. Firstly, Mac and Windows both offer a very mature command line interface. But also, I don’t think knowing Linux should require you to know the command line either. If other operating systems don’t require it, neither should Linux. If you’re focusing on “developer tools”, even then, what tools do most devs need that can’t be done from a UI? I live a lot of my time in the terminal but there’s very little that can’t actually be wrapped in a UI
            • skeeter2020 2y ago
              all your points are valid, and you don't "need" the knowledge but it sure feels like the UI can get in the way of some things, mislead your formation of a mental model, or reduce the clarity & density of information. I find most source control tools with mouse-driven UIs like this.
              • dagmx 2y ago
                I think CLI tools can help compartmentalise functionality and that can be helpful. But I think they can also obscure functionality the same way as a GUI tool. Take git for example, it’s much easier to visualize how it works from a GUI. Squashing is also faster in a GUI. But some other operations are clearer when you’re giving every flag yourself. Ultimately I think it comes down to the UX of something regardless of the form of UI it’s presented in.
    • benoau 2y ago
      I think Swift Playgrounds with Xcode Cloud will give kids the full idea-to-app journey soon, but it's kind of a "the monkey paw curls" solution.
• codetrotter 2y ago
  The way that it appeals to me is the idea that instead of having two devices (laptop and iPad), you’d only have the iPad. Saves money. Unfortunately, like you point out, the iPad is not actually usable as a laptop replacement, sadly.
  • ngcc_hk 2y ago
    That seems to be the “or” thinking. How about And. And when you away from desk like in the sub (us) or train (uk), you can have a look and test or just study a part of the code you have troubled to debug, understand or learn. At the same time, some “developer” might like to stay in one Env. Sadly there is no dual Env for mac, and windows tablet mode …
    • codetrotter 2y ago
      > That seems to be the “or” thinking. How about And. Ok, but this “and” thinking doesn’t help me do what I said: get rid of laptop, save money.
• pjmlp 2y ago
  Definitely, specially because tablets with keyboard, pen writing recognition, killed what was left from the netbooks market.
  • badsectoracula 2y ago
    And then oversized phones killed tablets, bringing us the worst of both worlds :-P I was looking into tablets recently and there is a dearth of options - a quick search in a local eshop aggregator has ~20 2024 tablets after i filter out the sucky specs and ~72 2024 laptops (including some larger ones), again after filtering the sucky specs. Meanwhile there are ~276 2024 phones after sucky spec filtering and that is with greater specs than the tablet ones (because the aggregator had no filters matching the tablet specs - even the minimum specs in phones were higher than the high specs in tablets). All these give me the impression that we're long past the hype days of tablets.
    • WillAdams 2y ago
      Have you considered: https://www.lincplustech.com/products/lincstudio-s1-drawing-tablet https://www.lincplustech.com/products/lincstudio-s1-drawing-... (if I hadn't panicked and bought a spare Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360, I'd be trying one)
    • pjmlp 2y ago
      I see iPads, Huawei, Surfaces, and Samsung tablets all over the place in the European coffees, trains and planes.
  • WillAdams 2y ago
    When I wanted a replacement for my Samsung Galaxy Book 12 (a 12" tablet w/ a bundled folding keyboard case and included S-Pen) I had to go up to a Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360 (since that was the only high-resolution device w/ an S-Pen then available) and had to go shopping for a new bag to carry it. I do use it for development after a fashion (OpenSCAD, https://pythonscad.org/ https://pythonscad.org/ and sometimes https://www.blockscad3d.com/editor/ https://www.blockscad3d.com/editor/ or OpenSCAD Graph Editor, usually using TeXWorks for Literate Programming), but also for drawing/sketching and note-taking and annotating PDFs.
• pennomi 2y ago
  iPad is also a brilliant drawing tablet. If Apple didn’t intentionally cripple it, it might be the best self-contained mini gamedev studio available. But you gotta sell MacBooks AND iPads, amirite?
  • al_borland 2y ago
    Even if we assume the best intentions, I think iOS and iPadOS is still recovering from being crippled based on early design decisions. I remember at one of the Apple events Steve Jobs was saying the one area of complexity that still hung people up was the filesystem, so iOS (and as an extension, iPadOS) hid it away from the user. Files were locked to apps. As the platform evolved, people wanted/needed to operate in multiple apps with one file, so this concept of duplicating files in multiple apps came to be. This was a mess when it came to file versioning. It was also very difficult and confusing, and required apps to support it. Eventually they added the Files app, but it is a very slow road to change over from an app based system to a file based system. Even today, it’s a crap shoot and some apps work better with the Files app than others, and it seems this aspect is still much more confusing than macOS from this perspective. This was a huge miss that no one really talks about.
• deergomoo 2y ago
  > this is exactly the kind of job where a laptop is more efficient You are correct, but I think efforts like this are an important part of discovering how we can make the tablet form factor useful for more types of productivity. Software design is an evolutionary process, and I think professional tablet software is still pretty stunted in that department. Largely down to Apple's endless resistance against allowing the iPad to be used as a computer rather than a media appliance. The more stuff we get like this, the sooner we can collectively work out how to work around the shortcomings (no guaranteed keyboard, poor feature discoverability of touch-first UIs) and lean into the positives (handheld, ultraportable, direct manipulation). It's crazy that we've had the iPad for 14 years and tablet computers in general much longer than that but we seemingly still haven't worked it out yet. It still feels like the only options are scaled up phone software (iOS, Android) or desktop software with a touch layer awkwardly bolted on (Windows).
  • skeeter2020 2y ago
    >> It's crazy that we've had the iPad for 14 years and tablet computers in general much longer than that but we seemingly still haven't worked it out yet. Maybe there's nothing to work out? At least for activities like this
    • runevault 2y ago
      There may not be, but unless it is attempted seriously do we actually know? Is the current local maxima near the global one or are we a long ways off? I have no idea, but I can't assume we are already there just because my imagination can't come up with a better solution.
    • dagmx 2y ago
      People said that for photoshop and then procreate took over a big chunk of the market. Similarly people said that for desktop sculpting but many artists now use Nomad, plus there’s ZBrush for iPad coming out. How do you we know it’s not worth working out unless someone tries? And even if it doesn’t work out, just look at some of the UI learnings here that could be valuable to apply backwards.
• janice1999 2y ago
  I'm doing Godot tutorials on a Steam Deck with a wireless mouse and keyboard. I can't imagine using the touch screen.
• ako 2y ago
  > at this point it's mostly a laptop. Exactly, it's mostly a laptop, so it's my main driver when at home. No inconvenient keyboard in the way when consuming media on the couch, but very productive when coupled with a (mechanical) keyboard, mouse and external display. Getting my ipad is no bother, getting my laptop is.
• sandoze 2y ago
  I’m always confused by these comments. iPad Pros have a very capable (and expensive) keyboard which doubles as a great stand. BLE keyboards and mice can be paired with an iPad. Wired keyboards also work.
  • stackghost 2y ago
    See the second paragraph of the comment to which you replied: If you're going to use the iPad with a keyboard, why not just use a laptop? I suppose the use case here is iOS game developers who don't want to use their MacBooks, but iPad+keyboard doesn't seem like a fun way to write complex software to me.
  • rxyz 2y ago
    To add: I found the M4 iPad Pro keyboard to be a better typing experience than my MacBook Pro keyboard or the standalone Magic Keyboard
  • al_borland 2y ago
    I often see my dad use his iPad in keyboard/mouse mode. At this point I question the point of the iPad. It seems like the user is seeking to interact with it like a laptop, yet the OS is far more compromised than macOS. Window management isn’t as flexible, all apps need to come from the App Store, things that power users would generally want (like Terminal) aren’t there for the native OS, Files is less capable than Finder, and the entire OS is build around apps rather than files, which makes working on a file across multiple applications more difficult. I think my tech life would be more simple if I could use an iPad as my computer, but I can’t see a path there. I’d have to give up too much.
    • neilalexander 2y ago
      If you're looking at this from the perspective of a power user, then sure. For everyone else, the iPad makes a robust computing device that simply does not have a lot of complexity that we power users have just learned to accept. Try explaining the concept of "files" or "terminals" to a random person on the street.
• dagmx 2y ago
  There’s two parts to this. 1. By porting the frontend to SwiftUi, they’re actually making it more native for all Apple platforms. He hints at it, but this is a great first step to having Godot native on visionOS where they can iterate on their games natively in device. 2. A lot of creators (not necessarily developers) have switched to the iPad as a primary creation device. Perhaps not a majority by any means, but a sizeable amount. Concept artists are on iPad. Recently the character designer for Blue Eye Samurai did most of their work in Procreate. 3D sculptors are picking it up as well with Nomad sculpt and I think the soon to be released ZBrush for iPad (September 10th apparently). So if you’re on the more visual side of things, and you’ve already got your workflow on iPad, this lets you continue that workflow.
  • nightowl_games 2y ago
    His fork will likely become out of date with upstream pretty quickly once he stops working on it, id imagine.
    • dagmx 2y ago
      What does that have to do with what you’re replying to?
  • __loam 2y ago
    Was going to say the same thing. A lot of artists use iPad pros as their most important and only device now.
• napkin 2y ago
  I primarily use an iPad pro. Hardware-wise, I think it’s a superior paradigm. Most of the time I’m using it with the magic keyboard. I love that if the keyboard is damaged, it’s totally removed from the device. We don’t need to talk about the OS!
• blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
  The iPad, and tablets in general, have never been great for productivity. Maybe it is fine for email, but that’s about it. Apple has been careful to not bring any of the conveniences of MacBooks into the iPad, and unfortunately it means the “Pro” versions of the iPad are basically not any more useful than the regular ones. Even simple things like multitasking - copying content between apps or moving browser tabs around or whatever - can be difficult or impossible.