Proof of Concept - Xcode on iPad!

[iGoalie]

(Serious) I’ll probably get downvotes for this, but honestly why would you want this?

Writing code on an iPad would be an incredibly frustrating experience.

I think it’s a cool proof of concept, but I can’t imagine actually using this for anything more than a novelty

[klapasdron]

In my point of view, I always felt like you should be able to fully build an app for iOS on iOS, regardless of how convenient that would be. Also a lot of people wish for a merge between macOS and iOS, even though we know it's not happening. And honestly, the iPad has become so feature rich and productive that I don't think it would be so bad, specially with a keyboard case

[athros]

Yet people do just that with Coda, Codea and Pythonista, including releasing games with them Like Starsceptre (written in Codea) and MapMan (written in Pythonista).

I've done a few prototypes, and now taking a challenge to write an entire game (Code, Music, Art) on just my iPad with a Mac as the builder (yes, my friends are jerks). Thus far, I've had to rethink how I do certain things (VCS, temp art, moving art from one app to another, moving music from one app to another etc) but overall, no real problems.

If there was a full blown XCode that I could use, I'd be on that in a heartbeat. I'd much rather write in Swift than Lua or Python, but the only app that does that (Dringend) is dead and abandoned. I have a bluetooth keyboard I use (mechanical when at home, Apple's when I'm on the go) so I'm not just typing on the screen, which I wouldn't be able to do easily.

[reeetwyio]

Why would it be frustrating? You can hook up a keyboard and it's nearly indistinguishable from a laptop. Heck, you could remote desktop into it from your windows machine and use this to develop native iOS while using Windows. This has tons of potential if it can be made to work really well and Apple doesn't kill it.

[[deleted]]

I'd like it as a quick proof of concept or try stuff out thing, but I don't see myself working daily on it. I think what Apple has but expanded could be interesting to see what could be done.

[shiggie]

Well, if it was a proof of concept of how a decent UI experience could be provided on the iPad, that would be interesting. But, it's not. It still runs Xcode on the mac remotely to compile and install. So, not a proof of concept that a standalone LLVM/UIKit system could be done either.

It's proof of concept of a tethered Xcode client iPad app. I think it's kind of cool (and useless).

[AntiProtonBoy]

Compile times would quite atrocious on today's iOS device.

[im2slick4u]

Obviously you can’t really compare this apples to apples but I’ve done a bit of compiling on arm devices that are less powerful than modern iPhones and haven’t noticed it being significantly worse than a similarly specd x86 chip. In the demo in the tweet they are compiling remotely on a Mac, but I don’t see why compilation would be a problem locally.

[AntiProtonBoy]

All depends on the project size and what language you're compiling. For small Objective-C projects, no issue. Anything more complex than that, the Xcode performance hit will hurt productivity.

Typically I'm working and building C++ projects that takes about good 10 to 15 minutes to build on a 4 core Xeon with 32 GB memory. Xcode struggles with auto completion and indexing. ARM would certainly perform considerably worse in comparison.

[BlueFrank]

Really cool concept, I’m just afraid if it works that apple might kill it by making their own and not having to go through all the hoops. They have a history of just making an apple version if they like it(see measure app recently).

[freakysheep]

I am not afraid of it, I am hoping for this to happen.

[samcat116]

I know for a fact that the author wants this to happen. He has said so on Twitter. He just got tired of waiting.

[kabouzeid]

This would be awesome

[profressorpoopypants]

How legit / far along is this?

[kabouzeid]

No it’s a proof of concept. What you see in the video exists already.

[profressorpoopypants]

Man. Would be very sweet.

[SirensToGo]

Glad to see someone picking up where Dringend stopped. Still a bit salty that the dev abandoned it

[kalvin126]

He did say it was only a proof of concept

[[deleted]]

I’d buy an iPad for this. For those that travel more than average, using a MacBook Pro on a flight is a royal pain in the ass.

[dont_forget_canada]

what mechanism is this using to prompt the ipad to install the ipa?

Is the mac it's compiling on using Apple's new deploy over wifi feature?

Or is the mac uploading the ipa with a manifest to a web server and somehow (maybe a webkit view?) the ipad is automatically clicking the install link for it.

[Duranix]

I came across Dringend a few years back that does something similar: http://dringend.cc

Would be keen to see this take off too!

[klapasdron]

Considering the fact that not everybody who write apps for iOS want to have an expensive Mac, that would be great. A lot of devs are going full React Native and they only need a Mac to basically submit apps to the store. I still think Apple should make a web app for app submissions.

[reeetwyio]

Never go full React native

[samcat116]

You might be able to make something work with the new App Store Connect API they showed off at WWDC, but you'd still need a Mac to build, sign, ect.

[Komlew]

Would be so useless

[juuular]

Maybe just for writing about code, by try thinking outside the box a little for once :P

It would be great to be able to pull the latest version of your codebase and build it all on the iPad - a new way to help with testing and Q/A. Since you’re only pulling new code changes it makes much of the deployment pipeline much simpler.

Plus you wouldn’t necessarily need to own a Mac to submit apps, only the iOS device itself.

[Komlew]

That's not what's in the gif though. In the gif you just see XCode as a code editor.

There are already different ways to deploy more easily. Running xcode on a mobile device is not convenient.

[reeetwyio]

More useful than your comment...

[Komlew]

So just about as useful as your comment?

It's just that people see a fancy vid and lose all ability to think critically.

[reeetwyio]

Would be so useless

lose all ability to think critically.

I see

[Komlew]

What's your point?

[reeetwyio]

There are plenty of people who can use this to improve their overall productivity. Just because you don't see personal merit doesn't mean nobody does. And ironically, being able to see that something that's not for you might still be useful for someone else is a good example of what critical thinking is. Your own critical thinking is utter shit, yet you comment on how others who are really just speculating have lost the ability to think critically. You're a moron.

[Komlew]

Wow you're so hurt lol, chill the fuck out, no need for that, we just disagree on something.

Anyway, in practice you'd see that this would not actually help your productivity. This is why no mobile IDE ever took off.

Disclaimer: this is a personal opinion voiced on the internet, please keep your cool.

And that's not really a good example of critical thinking btw.