As I began travelling more and more, it became quite a responsibility to travel with a heavy £3,000 MacBook Pro. I wanted an alternative that would still allow me to carry out business and work tasks, such as email and programming.
Visiting the Apple Store was more than enough to persuade me to make the leap and purchase the 12.9 inch 2018 iPad Pro – although it came at a cost of nearly £1,200 with the Smart Keyboard Folio addon.
As well as web development, it’s extremely handy for client meetings and calls. It’s great for making annotations to web pages, taking notes and hosting Skype calls.
After purchasing the iPad, you’ll also need the relevant apps in order to carry out your coding tasks. I went with Coda at a cost of £23.99, as it’s important that you choose a coding tool that does everything you need it to.
After extensive research, I found this to be the best one for my needs; although I understand developers needs differ so it’s important to do your research, read the reviews and check out some YouTube videos. The better apps will cost, but are ultimately a small price to pay in comparison to the iPad itself and for completing quality work.
I’m an avid PHPStorm fan, but it seems the developers currently have no plan to bring this software to iOS just yet. Coda is the closest alternative I could find, which includes key features similar PHPStorm such as “projects”, which Coda refers to as “sites”, and of course FTP – which saves having to use a separate app. The one thing Coda lacks is the ability to hook up to version control such as Github, but that’s probably down to the lack of software to support it from the iOS side.
The iPad will mainly be used for backend coding, as front end is still a struggle without being able to use certain features, especially Inspect Element as found on many desktop browsers. However, Coda is still great for most forms of coding, especially with the range of syntax highlighting available for HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, Python, and more. They do have various front end tools, such as a preview mode to see your changes live without going into the browser, but I’d still find this very tricky to use if coding from a static design.
Although becoming less frequent with the power of the internet, when meeting a client in person we can easily annotate a web design together to get an understanding of their required changes and additions. This can be a lot easier than writing a list with no clear direction in many cases. This becomes even more fun if you opted to purchase the Apple Pencil, which is something I’d recommend if you’re a graphic designer especially.
Ultimately, the iPad Pro is a great portable tool for anyone in the web design or development business regardless of your role. They do offer a smaller model, but from what I’ve seen it would be more of a struggle to work efficiently from. There’s also many other things that can be done to accelerate your professional or personal life.