Productivity and phones

April 19, 2019

Will it ever become a real thing?

When Steve Jobs introduced the iphone he said in his presentation that ios is based on the same core as macos. I thought: oh yeah, now i can use Flash on the go. I wasn't thinking of the Flash player, but of the full IDE that can edit .fla files.

Same goes for the Terminal app. I am a big fan of the cli app that is built into macos. It's the linchpin of my workflow. And after more than a decade i am still waiting for Terminal to arrive on the iphone.

Sure there are decent ssh clients in the app store and i have experimented with setups that connect to a remote linux server. But running vim through a network doesn't feel exactly snappy. Not to mention it will take a huge chunk out of your dataplan and there will be times you have no network connection at all.

Another thing that is weird, is that the code editing feature of github was not available on their mobile site. But i just checked now and it seems to be available now. I used to think it wasn't, but seems i learned something while double checking the info for this post. Well, that is actually good news.

I will need to test it out some more, but the github site doesn't seem to be supporting offline behavior yet.

Anyway i think the Working Copy app is still my best option for now. It is a really good git client and i have written my last few blog posts with it. I can also do small code changes and then deploy it to the Netlify hosting service, which will run the node.js build scripts on their server. It is my best phone productivity setup for now.