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IOS Iphone Programming Software Apple Technology

Devs Might Be Able To Write Software On iPad, iPhone With Xcode For iOS (cultofmac.com) 77

Posted by BeauHD from the what-to-expect dept.
macOS and iOS software developers will soon be able to code on an iPad or even iPhone, if an unconfirmed report is correct. iPadOS 14 and the iPhone equivalent will reportedly include support for Xcode, Apple's software development environment. Cult of Mac reports: This report comes from Jon Prosser, founder of YouTube channel Front Page Tech, who recently correctly predicted the launch date of the 2020 iPhone SE. On Monday, Prosser said via Twitter "XCode is present on iOS / iPad OS 14. The implications there are HUGE." Whenever anyone suggests that iPads have become as powerful as MacBooks, someone always asks, "Does it do Xcode?" The implication is that iPads are just toys -- only Macs are real computers. But if Prosser is correct, then devs will be able to use iPad or Mac, whichever they prefer. This is part of Apple steadily upgrading the capabilities of its tablets over years, especially the iPad Pro line. These now have USB-C ports, support for accessing external media, mouse support, etc. And top-tier iPad processors as powerful as Apple laptops.
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Devs Might Be Able To Write Software On iPad, iPhone With Xcode For iOS More

Devs Might Be Able To Write Software On iPad, iPhone With Xcode For iOS

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  • Touchscreens still suck (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bluescrn ( 2120492 ) on Monday April 20, 2020 @06:16PM (#59970286)
    Touchscreens are still horrendously imprecise input devices, requiring gigantic UI elements, and these lead to extreme dumbing-down of app UI and functionality

    Try developing anything significant without a mouse+keyboard. Also without a proper/exposed file system... Yeah, there are iPad keyboards and that overpriced stylus, that the OS is still completely touch-centric, with jumbo-sized UI designed elements for fat fingers. It will be interesting to see how they've tried to adapt a complex dev environment to that UI system.

    My guess is that it'll be, like everything 'appified', massively cut down and dumbed down.

    • Try developing anything significant without a mouse+keyboard.

      With an iPad you do not have to, as the last update provides mouse/trackpad support for iPad, and they even rolled out a new keyboard cover that includes a trackpad, and works with somewhat older iPad Pro units.

      Also without a proper/exposed file system...

      That's my bigger concern as well, but you can manage files pretty well already within Xcode. It's not quite at Emacs "application is another OS" level, but you can do quite a bit along with git m

      • Let me guess, if you wouldn't call it 'dumbed down' would you call it 'courageous'?
        • Well, it makes sense to simplify the interface of a lot of apps for mobile, but XCode is an app exclusively for developers. They might dumb it down, but do we have any apps from Apple, mobile or not, that donâ(TM)t meet the basic requirements?

        • if you wouldn't call it 'dumbed down' would you call it

          I usually wait to see what something is (or if something ever comes to be) before judging it - but hey, you do you!

          My thinking is that if it's not useful, why would Apple even bother releasing it. My further thinking is, there's no reason why it could not be nearly fully featured, and with some aspects that could be better - so if something even comes out (people have been claiming we'd have Xcode on the iPad for years). So there's a decent chance i

      • That's my bigger concern as well, but you can manage files pretty well already within Xcode.

        You don't need full-on root filesystem access for this however. Apple could simply leverage the Containers support built into APFS (which is the underlying filesystem for all modern iOS/iPadOS installations) to create a project-specific filesystem for development. The OS and apps would remain safely isolated.

        Yaz

      • Yeah, the iPad is becoming less of a tablet and more of a desktop.

      • With an iPad you do not have to, as the last update provides mouse/trackpad support for iPad, and they even rolled out a new keyboard cover that includes a trackpad, and works with somewhat older iPad Pro units.

        So why not just buy a laptop then? That way you don't have to lug around several devices just to get something you can work on.

        Most people I know that uses an iPad (or whatever brand) usually only uses it for browsing, social media and watching movies - almost no-one does any serious work on them because they are essentially useless in that regard.

        • So why not just buy a laptop then? That way you don't have to lug around several devices just to get something you can work on.

          An iPad Pro is a good few pounds lighter (1.42lbs for largest model) than even the slimmest Apple laptop (2.8lbs MacBook Air).

          Also, while traveling my development needs are more on an emergency only basis - the majority of what I do is photo editing when traveling, and for that I greatly prefer using a stylus on an iPad over a trackpad or a mouse. There's a reason why professional

        • almost no-one does any serious work on them because they are essentially useless in that regard.

          iPad is rapidly gaining popularity in construction. In fact, iPad is fairly ubiquitous among trade foreman at this point. PlanGrid, baby. [plangrid.com]

          • iPad is rapidly gaining popularity in construction. In fact, iPad is fairly ubiquitous among trade foreman at this point. PlanGrid, baby.

            I don't doubt that there are some use-cases where a iPad or the like is a perfect fit, but programming is not one of them which was what the article was all about.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        With an iPad you do not have to, as the last update provides mouse/trackpad support for iPad, and they even rolled out a new keyboard cover that includes a trackpad, and works with somewhat older iPad Pro units.

        Have you had a look at their keyboard though? As well as being crap to type on it doesn't have an ESC key or any F keys at all. It's still very beta quality too, e.g. to change the keyboard backlight brightness you have to go into settings, input, keyboard, keyboard hardware and then adjust he slider.

        The iPad also sucks for multitasking. Try video conferencing and making notes at the same time. Haven't tried it for development but it's not looking good.

        Anyone serious about writing code will want a dual moni

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

          Have you had a look at their keyboard though? As well as being crap to type on it doesn't have an ESC key or any F keys at all. It's still very beta quality too, e.g. to change the keyboard backlight brightness you have to go into settings, input, keyboard, keyboard hardware and then adjust he slider.

          Yeah, it's too bad once something is designed, it's stuck there for like, forever and can never be improved, iterated on, or fixed. Once someone builds something, that's it, you gotta live with all the design m

    • Question: Can you not use an external keyboard and mouse with the iPad and iPhone?

      (Disclaimer: I haven't owned an Apple device in a decade)

      • External keyboards have ben supported for some time. External mice started being supported in iOS 13 via the Accessibility features, but recently moved up to full-on support in the latest iOS release. It's a bit different than using a mouse on your PC -- the "pointer" is a small filled circle, that "morphs" into the shape of the objects you can interact with when you mouse over them.

        Yaz

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Teckla ( 630646 )

          Also worth mentioning is the "morphing" behavior can be disabled:

          Settings > General > Accessibility > Pointer Control > Pointer Animations

    • They've added mouse support. But in another way you are right I think. It's not just running XCode, can you run your webserver, db, have a 3 monitor setup attached to the iPad etc. It'll be fine for self contained games and UI designers but I think end of the day someone's still going to have to have a desktop or server kicking around to run all the other pieces for most apps. It will be great for people that just need to make the occasional fairly small app to attach to their main one though. Say you are m

    • Touchscreens are still horrendously imprecise input devices, requiring gigantic UI elements, and these lead to extreme dumbing-down of app UI and functionality

      Touchscreens are quite different from mice, trackballs, and trackpads, requiring differently designed UI elements, and in the hands of unimaginative developers these go hand-in-hand with extreme dumbing-down of app UI and functionality.

      see how easy it is to have an opinion without wielding it like a blunt weapon?

  • Especially now that the iPad has mouse support, there's no reason you couldn't have a pretty decent version of Xcode running on an iPad that would let you edit easily.

    Coding requires a lot of different files, but with the IDE acting as a more advanced file manager, and working atop a git repo, I could see it working.

    This would be great for me, I personally would prefer to travel with just an iPad, but because I need to support some iOS apps at times, I've generally always taken a laptop on trips. If I could

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by shmlco ( 594907 )

      "I think possibly for some tasks like rapid prototyping, that an iPad may serve even better than Xcode on a laptop..."

      This.

      I saw a video the other night that showed some guy blown away by how easily he was able to edit a 4K video on an iPad Pro and just how effortlessly it handled the task. Including near real-time export of the final product. The comment he made that stuck with me is that people keep looking at how existing desktop-based tools would fail on a tablet and--by and large--they'ed be right abou

  • iPhone coding - Brilliant! (Score:4, Funny)

    by niftydude ( 1745144 ) on Monday April 20, 2020 @06:24PM (#59970306)
    I'm going to love coding on a 6" phone touchscreen keyboard so much. Finally I'll be able to give up my slow tactile mechanical keyboard and dual 24" screens forever!

    As the article says - the implications are HUGE! Just imagine extreme programming sessions with everyone gathered around that 6" phone screen.

    Kudos Apple, you've done it again.

    • Can you not mirror the iPhone's screen to a TV, and use an external keyboard and mouse? I don't think anyone would consider using just the phone.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by _xeno_ ( 155264 )

        Mirror is the key word - sure, you can mirror the display. It's still going to be duplicate of what you see on the phone. You can't connect an external display to an iPhone in the sense that you can to a laptop. It will always mirror the display, so you'll always get a display that will be designed to be seen on a phone.

        As for an external keyboard and mouse, the answer is "maybe" - the iPhone supports Bluetooth keyboards. Bluetooth mouse support is currently an "accessibility" feature and treats the mouse a

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by shmlco ( 594907 )

          "But unless external display support is improved..."

          I'd basically count on this. We didn't have trackpad support yesterday, now we do. And some apps (iMove, iPhoto, Luma Fusion, etc.) already let you use an external display separate and distinct from that of the iPad's display. (e.g. not just mirrored).

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dfghjk ( 711126 )

        You think the UI gets more functional when you mirror it? OK, you can see it better, but so what? You think an iPhone interface will exploit an external keyboard and mouse?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by mabinogi ( 74033 )

      Yes, it's a well documented effect that adding support for something you don't see a use for automatically removes your ability to do the thing you normally do.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ljw1004 ( 764174 )

      I'm going to love coding on a 6" phone touchscreen keyboard so much. Finally I'll be able to give up my slow tactile mechanical keyboard and dual 24" screens forever!

      I assume you're joking.

      Apple's vision is that we're near the end of the laptop/desktop era. They believe the successor will be devices like iPads - ones with walled gardens, where app install+uninstall is safe and from a store, and where you attach a keyboard or trackpad as needed. Microsoft had the same vision with Win10, and pushed it through earlier and more comprehensively and (so far) with better developer support than Apple. Microsoft put their money where their mouth is by producing the Surface and S

    • I know! And besides that, "hello world" will now be a breeze to create through the menus.
    • But will it support that lets you write PHP by throwing cow-pats at the screen with your Wii-mote?

      That must be the most popular web development tool in the world, judging by the quality of PHP one sees these days!

  • I havenâ(TM)t opened my laptop in months. This year I did my taxes on my iPad, I work with spreadsheets on my iPad, I do a fancy math equations and graphing etc. on my iPad. For most people I donâ(TM)t think they need anything more.
  • Just writing a long email completely sucks on the iPad. Coding on the thing would be horrific. Despite what they keep saying the thing is NOT a fucking replacement for a laptop / desktop. The OS just has too many limitations, ie no file system, shitty multi tasking, and most productivity apps are cut down to point where productivity just plummets. IPad is just a consumption device no matter how man hip videos we get shown how its the panacea of productivity.

    • Yes, it sucks. But I've definitel seen it people pull into programming. I know a guy in his 30s who wanted to learn how to program. He first started on his iPad, with Apple's Playgrounds app. You learn how variables, functions and loops work. Then he borrowed a MacBook from someone and installed Xcode, and struggled through an online course. He's publishing his first app right now.

  • view controller iOS app on a phone or tablet. OK maybe you can. But who in their right mind would want to?

    All I am going to say is Storyboard!!! and I love my multiple monitors.

    Just my 2 cents ;)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by shmlco ( 594907 )

      "All I am going to say is Storyboard!!! and I love my multiple monitors."

      I believe the counter to claiming that you wouldn't be able to effectively program on an iPad because storyboards would suck... is SwiftUI. Simply do away with storyboards altogether.

      Just as Swift effectively drove a stake through the heart of Objective-C, SwiftUI will--not today, but eventually--drive a stake through the heart of UIKIt.

      • I can believe that, because Storyboard is a dog nightmare of a UI development tool. Even MFC is more intuitive and pleasant.

    • view controller iOS app on a phone or tablet. OK maybe you can. But who in their right mind would want to?

      Yes you have more space...

      But thank about how much better storyboard performance could be editing a storyboard on an iPad! You'd be working with native components, not creaky storyboard mocks of iOS components.

      It might even make IBDesignable elements behave well enough to use reliably... every time I try to include some of those it either drags storyboard performance way down, or just breaks. If IBDes

  • Comment removed (Score:3)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday April 20, 2020 @06:41PM (#59970362)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • I can't imagine giving up all the tools useful to software development that are in Unix (MacOS). It might be possible to slap together trivial apps in IOS, but anything else would be pure torture.

  • There's going to be some catch to prevent you from being able to use open source code in this Xcode for iOS. Apple does not want you to be able to run just anything on iOS, they want to keep that heavily restricted and controller. That's why it costs a $100/year subscription to be allowed to run software written in Xcode on real devices. (You can run it in the simulator "for free" ignoring that you have to buy a $2600 laptop to run Xcode at all.)

    On the other hand, I think we all knew that this had to be com

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by slazzy ( 864185 )
      Why use $2600 laptop? xcode runs just fine on the 2012 Macbook pro I just bought for $100. The screen is broken but it's got an HDMI cable that plugs right into my 37" ultra-wide monitor. Not as nice as my Ubuntu machine, but just fine for developing the iOS version of my app.

    • That's why it costs a $100/year subscription to be allowed to run software written in Xcode on real devices.

      Apple lets you use the free dev account to deploy to devices now [slashdot.org]. That changed in 2019.

      You only need to pay if you want to deploy to the app store, or I think if you want to use TestFlight to distribute builds (not sure about that last one).

  • With 5k monitor and mouse/keyboard support it might actually be usable.

  • AIDE since 2016 [androidauthority.com] - develop Android apps ON an Android phone. Why anyone would want to do this, other than for a really quick and dirty UI/UX experiment, is beyond me. But - you can.
  • Tiny screen, limited storage, feeble cpu, running one of the most power hungry apps ever.

  • Prediction: only Swift support (Score:3)

    by Sebby ( 238625 ) on Monday April 20, 2020 @08:26PM (#59970680)

    I can't see Apple wanting (or really being capable of) supporting anything else than Swift - which means you can't "replace" your desktop/laptop if you've already got a complex (mixed objc/c/swift/scripted) project.

    I'll basically be Playgrounds on steroids.

  • Firstly, damn, I now wish I've gotten something with more memory than the 128G iPad Pro I got just last week.
    Xcode is seriously memory hungry and wasteful with not cleaning up old simulators etc
    Or maybe not....
    How would using something like Cocoa Pods [cocoapods.org] work when there is no CLI to install Ruby?
    All of my apps use Pods and I'd guess the vast majority of other apps also use Pods or similar.
    The lack of CLI is a serious block for being able to do any serious development work with XCode.

    • How would using something like Cocoa Pods work when there is no CLI to install Ruby?

      Whatever ships would I think only support Swift Package Manager, although there's no reason they could not also include a built in shell... and Xcode for the desktop already ships with Ruby.

      All of my apps use Pods and I'd guess the vast majority of other apps also use Pods or similar.

      I think vast majority may be overstating that - but a lot of people do. Swift package manager is close to being a good alternative that can do

  • ...because a tiny screen and a virtual keyboard make for an ideal development environment.
  • You might also be able to travel 10 miles to work on a donkey. But would you want to?

  • how will this work with apple's walled garden that is ios.
    if i can just load some code of whatever and compile it, the device is no longer limiting me to run whatever i might like to run on it.
    don't get me wrong, that is GREAT!
    but i don't see apple giving up it's control over ios.

  • It's POSSIBLE that they'll allow people to use Xcode on iPadOS, but I think it's far more likely that what Apple has been doing is rolling out a version of Xcode for iPad Pros because it's the most readily available ARM-based machine. This reads more like a precursor to an ARM-based Mac rollout than a really concerted endeavour to release Xcode on mobile devices.

    If they did release it for iOS devices, it's trivial for them to restrict the functionality to iPad Pros rather than just allowing it to run on any

  • I'm in the market for a new laptop and while the XPS 13 is almost the best option, the only thing has me considering the new MacBook Air and waiting to see what happens with the 13"(14"?) MacBook Pro is that I'd like a platform to do iOS development on. I already have an iPad and if I could do it all there to completion, I don't think I'd even be considering a MacBook.

  • I can see only one use case : debugging & profiling. My MBP Xcode seems a bit idiosynchratic, sometimes tethering an iPhone starts a USB discovery cycle that I have to kill, other times profiling stops working and requires at least a reboot, wireless debugging also has some issues depending on the device.
    If Xcode was running on the phone one type of debugging/profiling issues would perhaps go away.
    Typing on an on-screen keyboard annoys me to no end. Yes, I have tried swype it is both better & much w

  • Devs ( capital "D" develper) type120wpm when in-flow, cut and paste rarely and do with facility unmatched in " touch-y" world. SO no way even with a keyboard attached.

    Touch excels in " browse" AND there exists a place alongside a Dev to browse w/o interrupting a workspace or away from a running workspace to browse.

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