iPad is a very interesting device category. It mostly fits between a laptop and a phone in terms of portability and comfort. However it gets closer to the phone in terms of productivity, but closer to the laptop in terms of screen realestate. So what gives? Why even own an iPad?

An iPad has its benefits and I believe that in a few iterations of iOS, the iPad will be able to do everything a laptop can do, and keep the benefits it has right now. That’s why I got myself a brand new iPad Pro 11″. Welcome to my iFamily – iSagiri.

Right now the iPad is the perfect device for communication (FaceTime) with family and friends all over the world, and this is (and has been) my main use case for such a device. I can carry it around all over the house, show them anything, and see them very well on a big screen. Even more, the battery lasts so long that I could be talking to my parents for over 5-6 hours (while cooking food for Christmas or something) and still have over 50% remaining.

The second use case of the iPad for me is reading. Catching up on the news, browsing reddit, scrolling through Twitter, etc. All of this is very comfortable and pleasant while sitting on the couch with an iPad.

With the latest generation of iPad Pros a new use case has emerged for me, taking notes at work. I scribble a lot at work – relationship diagrams between entities, UI wireframes, algorithm debugging, all while wasting a ton of paper. Well with the iPad Pro with Apple Pencil, I don’t have to. I just use the notes app, and the pencil.

And here is where it falls flat: software development, long periods of typing, professional software.

Software Development

I am a software developer, and I also do UX. I want to be able to create UI mockups, prototype my ideas and the write them up in code. But I can’t do any of that on an iPad. None of the UI mocking tools such as Adobe XD or Sketch exist on the iPad, you can preview designs you’ve created on a computer beforehand, but nothing for actually creating them.

Same problem with coding. VSCode doesn’t exists, and all the other editors are pretty bad. Furthermore you cant run a node.js dev environment, which means I can even spin up a server and see my changes or debug anything. The best thing I can do is change some settings in WordPress…

Typing

I did not opt to get the new smart keyboard folio for my iPad, as I did not like the feel of it, I figured I’d wait for 3rd party manufacturers to make a better one (hasn’t happened yet). So whenever I need to type, I type directly on the screen. And trust me, it’s a nightmare. I type for over 8 hours a day for work and fun when I code, and I just can not stand the feeling of typing on an iPad. Having absolutely no tactile feedback is horrible, I miss buttons constantly, but even worse, I can not rest my hands on the keyboard as it registers that as presses. Whenever I am thinking of what to type, I rest my left hand fingers on the wasd keys, and that constantly triggers key presses on the iPad.

Conclusion: I need a keyboard attachment for the iPad, if I intend to do any kind of typing on it.

Professional Software

What I want to do: access my Lightroom library from my HDD and edit photos on my iPad. I can only do one of those things – the editing one. Lightroom for iOS is a Cloud friendly version, which can not access all the tens of thousands of RAW images I have on my HDD and all the years worth of edits I have in my lightroom library. And it doesn’t even have all the features that I need.

Other software is more related to IT – VSCode, MySQLWorkbench, Adobe XD etc.. I wish they existed on iPad, but they dont, so I can’t do work.

 

Overall I am very happy with this new device, it has served me well in flights, at work (for notes), at home, and I hope that in the coming year iOS will let me use it for some real work.