Two iPad apps I just got:

I just bought Prompt by Panic. I was inspired by that guy who replaced his Macbook with an iPad. It occurred to me that I could ssh into my dev machine from anywhere in the house and write code using vim. And I’m just weird enough to want to do that. (By “anywhere in the house” I really mean “three feet away on my other desk.”)

Prompt is cool. Simple, good.

[I enjoyed Brett’s honesty here (3 ft away, heh.), and I think while I know some folks who are screen based text editor lovers I cannot count myself among them, mostly because I can never remember the key commands that I need to remember (other than the most basic ones). Give me that GUI any day. That said, there are a lot of times when I need to SSH into a VM somewhere and get something done, and Prompt has been there for a while allowing to ease concerns regardless of where I am. (Now, to convince people to allow me to be out about even more… but anyway…)

There was one time when a session like that went from just a quick thing to “seriously?” in a very short while. I remembered that I had a wireless keyboard in my bag, got it paired up to the phone and got back to work. Infinitely better. So I get how you could do the same thing only even betterer on an iPad with its much larger screen. And I now take a keyboard with me more than I should.

But in the end I don’t see a big difference between using an iPad and a keyboard and using a MacBook Air… at least for coding and operations work. I know they are actual and conceptual differences (everything from cost to OS etc.) I do love that folks are stretching the way they work to make things more pleasant. For those of us at the pointy end of the web, running tests, or compiling code can often cause sword fights to break out. So while the novelty is cool, and I love the idea of running tests etc. remotely as part of a workflow, and I think it bends people’s minds around how you can work, where, and with a very small footprint, make sure you’re not working hard at using cool tools if it doesn’t make sense.]
Source: inessential.com