My thoughts about the iPad
If you follow technology or at a minimum, listen to the news. You know that the iPad is a table device manufactured and sold by Apple. Being that this is hardly news there have been a lot of commentary about the device. I am not going to rehash on that.
I got one for work, in which many may consider me lucky, but at the end of the day is just another tool to get my job done. Now a bit on the device. The iPad is a well made product, in par with the workmanship and quality expected from Apple. It is, after all, an overgrown iPod touch, but the extra real estate does provide some comfort and some challenges.
Many technology reviewers conclude that it is a lay back device to surf the web, and for the most part I concur, however with the right tools, it could be used for general computing needs, as long as these do not include programming.
Going about on most productivity applications, we are talking about drawing pads, a couple of office suites (word processors, presentation), very few database applications and a fair share of mind mapping tools.
However, there is a plethora of social network tools, from tweeter tools, blogging tools and location tools. This is nice, but they are hardly useful for business users and software developers.
There are few and far between that can be considered as serious development tools and the ones there are, they are mostly for web development. I have only seen one general purpose editor for the iPad that allows you to type, but not test, your code and Code Monkey that is basically an assistant/reference for UNIX development.
It’s a shame, a full blown UML diagraming system (which entails improvements to Code Monkey) would have certainly fill the bill for on the road code brain storming. Although Apple will frown on having a development tool, I do not see an harm of having an interpreter running in isolation from the rest of the environment that allows for prototyping while on the road. Being that we do not have these, many developers will use the iPad to tweet about what they are doing on their laptops/net books.
