[wildrhythms]

God I wish iPad OS was a better developer experience. Github's Codespaces feature is awesome, but as a front-end dev there is no way I could use iPad/iOS to build a website. There is no dev tools. The OS keeps trying to suspend apps/tabs in the background when I switch between them. I use the Vim extension in the VS Code remote editor but certain key combos on iOS straight up didn't register. Maybe I'm asking for too much.

[raphaelrk]

Apple wants the iPad OS developer experience to be bad

Their #1 focus is lock-in, preventing being commodified, and extracting value

No apps that run operating systems, no apps with windowed environments, no app-store-like apps / third party app stores, no browser engines, no Flash, terrible mobile safari experience, no OS mods / jailbreaks, no desktop-style cursors, physical iPad keyboards lacking escape keys. Wanting 30% of all payments for digital goods that occur on an iPhone.

Being able to eg "run Docker on your iPad" would go against all that. I think it's also a big part of why they charge $99/yr for being a developer - otherwise people would be able to sideload apps much more easily

Nice article related to this: https://subconscious.substack.com/p/aggregators-arent-open-e...

Hard to imagine just how different things might be right now if things were more open. iPhones are always on and connected to the internet - you could run servers from them! maybe mesh networking could actually be a thing?

The mother of all demos would not be allowed on the app store. Squeak/smalltalk would not be allowed. Feels disrespectful to humanity that the most popular platform in the US is so locked down. Idk how things would change here without government intervention -- this all seems to be in shareholders' interests.

Seems like a good time to be running a competitor. iOS being so locked down means they'll have lackluster support for the long tail of desired AI use cases. And cross platform development via react native is really good now, imo.

[weikju]

re: tabs suspending in the background

It's not talked about much, but one of the benefits of Stage Manager from iOS 16 is that all apps in the same "app set" are running concurrently and not getting suspended. So if you have your editor/ssh/browser in one app set, you can freely switch between them without fear of them suspending. And they can still be full screen, so no need to suffer the lessened screen real-estate, if you don't need to display 2+ windows at once.

[jwrallie]

Mosh on server and blink shell on iPad with a VPS running the actual Vim (or NeoVim) is a much better experience. I am using LunarVim with LSP support, so I can get functionality close to what Vscode provides.

I still wish I could run things locally without an internet connection, I am considering some portable SBC but it seems a waste of potential, as the iPad is much more powerful.

[ja27]

The Inspect Browser app mostly makes up for not having dev tools in Safari.

The background app issue is my biggest problem. I kind of work around it by using my phone to avoid app switching on the iPad.

No, actually, the lack of a damn escape key on the iPad's Magic Keyboard is my biggest issue. Yeah I map capslock to escape but my lizard brain can't handle that. I have a pair of server-side tricks to map ` to escape in bash and vim but it's a pain when I'm hopping around systems all day.

[mattrighetti]

Why don't you use Termius and SSH into the Codespaces instance? That way you could just use vim directly from there.

[galleywest200]

Also could install a browser based VSCode on that remote server and access that.

https://github.com/coder/code-server

[ja27]

Or Blink Code which runs VSCode in it's own browser control and has a filesystem extension.

https://docs.blink.sh/advanced/code