I’m very excited about the new iPad Pro. I’m excited about USB-C opening up the possibility of external displays. And I love that they shaved an edge off the Apple Pencil so you don’t have to plug it in to anything anymore. Wireless is the future. I’m on board.

I wish, though, that there was a better story for developers on iPad. There are stand-alone apps for accessing GitHub and organizational tools like Jira. But there are very few coding tools. Panic’s Coda is surprisingly good, but can’t support version control. And even if they found a way to bake in Git support - few projects are lovingly hand-coded HTML. We use build tools powered by NodeJS. We run dev servers. We connect to local databases.

Perhaps Apple sees a sharp divide. You can do “work” on an iPad as long as your work lives in an app or on the web. But Apple things development belongs on a laptop. I don’t think it needs to be this way.

Apple wants iOS to be locked down for security, simplicity, and ease-of-use. But developers need the ability to break things. I’d love to see some kind of sandboxed “environment” come to iOS.

I dream about a magical “Docker” app where a tiny VM has a mount point in the Files application, but runs a tiny Linux universe all safe and locked away on its own. Coding apps could access the files (in Files) while the VM app could provide a Terminal.

sigh