We are aware of this and are working on an on screen keyboard, kind of like this: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/04/integrating-virtual-k...

To answer the question below: we would need a custom layout to ensure all the curly brackets and other common JS chars are one tap away

The Google docs team stopped to use contentEditable and developed instead a new "editing surface and layout engine" in Javascript. http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2010/05/whats-different-about...

I don't have an iPad(yet), but I tried a very basic page you can get at http://beebole.com/brol/contentEditable.html Tap the blue screen and start to type. On an android phone it works ok.

Why not use the buit-in keyboard-UI in the iPad?

Don't work on iOS. In my web app, I display a plain textarea for iPhone and iPad, but it's not an IDE.

Why doesn't @contenteditable work on the iPhone?

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/723592/why-doesnt-content...

Is contentEditable not supported by iPad?

http://www.quora.com/Is-contentEditable-not-supported-by-iPa...

AFAIK it supports contentEditable, but just doesn't show the keyboard for those elements. So theoretically formatting commands and such work.

It looks like the UI uses an editable div. I believe that editable divs do not trigger the built in keyboard on an iPhone, and there's no way to force it to do so.

I have played with making an absolutely positioned single-char text input box in my custom editor (https://github.com/dnewcome/richie). The idea is that it forces the built-in keyboard to show but the input is caught and inserted into the DOM. I don't use contenteditable since it doesn't work on most mobile devices. My hacks are really rough but I think the technique could be polished eventually.

Alright, but shouldn't the solution be to allow the user to use either Google's keyboard or the built-in(by using textarea)?

The built-in one has a dictionary and some autocompletion, which could be good or annoying... :)

Most likely annoying if you're writing code.

Yes, a custom keyboard for this kind of app should include the necessary buttons for JavaScript. Curly braces, etc.

Perhaps, maybe on par with seeing some home-made keyboard on screen. IMHO.