[wbrendel]

First, this looks like a nicely done app.

Serious question though: Who is doing serious development work on their iPad? Is this for the PHP developer on the go who needs to make a quick edit to a file on their remote server while riding in a taxi, or are people expected to use this app to do real* work?

* This bears repeating: This is a serious question, and I'm not trying to sound dismissive or judgmental. If you do serious development work on your iPad, I'd love to hear more about your workflow.

[donny]

IMHO ….

Disclaimer: I'm doing something similar http://worqshop.com. The difference is the angle. It's not just a text editor with file transfer (FTP, Dropbox, etc.). I'm doing an IDE for the iPad. With GitHub support (and soon, Heroku deployment).

At the moment, iPad is not very good as a development environment, since Apple doesn't allow you to compile / run code on the iPad directly. You need backend support (e.g. cloud) that allows you to edit / compile / run code on the iPad.

But an iPad with multi touch interface and a bluetooth keyboard opens up a lot of interesting possibilities as an IDE. For example, the multi touch interface allows you to choose colour graphically (see http://twolivesleft.com/Codea/Screen-Colors.png ). Rather than experimenting with different values of RGB, you can just tap it.

I'm still building Worqshop. Thus, I'm not using the iPad as a development tool. I still need Xcode and my Mac :) At the moment, I'm using Worqshop to edit some HTML/CSS on GitHub, building HTML5 apps with Worqshop + GitHub + StackMob….. And soon, with Heroku deployment support, I can write Ruby / Python apps on my iPad and deploy it to Heroku.

Footnote 1: I still think the bluetooth keyboard is necessary for fast typing. I can't type very fast with the on screen keyboard

Footnote 2: I still prefer to code using text rather than using graphical items (i.e http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_programming_language ). Simply because text is a very compact representation of the semantics of code. As an example, to represent the semantic of "if / then / else" you only need a few lines of code. But with visual programming language, you need a bunch of nodes with graphs, etc. (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ktechlab_FlowCode.png )

[mark_l_watson]

I usually use my own git repos on my own servers. Is this possible with your product?

[vilya]

Speaking for myself, I use it mainly for taking notes in Markdown format. I've done a bit of coding with it, but no more than snippets (usually because I wanted to think through a particular algorithm in detail). I could imagine using it to tweak a bit of existing code while I'm on the go too, but the onscreen keyboard is still too slow when you're writing new code. Don't get me wrong: Textastic is a great app and it's far and away the best text editing environment I've ever seen for the iPad; this is more of an issue with using a virtual keyboard.

[Kaizyn]

I think more and more people are trying to treat the iPad like a real computer. This seems misguided to me because the existing development tools and systems are rooted in the keyboard and (optional) mouse. Since the touch screen interface on tablets is so different, we really should be working on developing alternative systems that make full use of multitouch capabilities.

[christiangenco]

What we need is a touch-based intuitive-ish interface that does everything vi bindings do.