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> Programming on a Tablet: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XmxtIDWI_E

That clip is 1.5 minutes long. I can handle any annoying thing for a minute and a half. But I can not see any way that would be sustainable for an entire day (week, years) of coding. I doubt I will ever give up my physical keyboard.

Your drawing example makes perfect sense though. We started with the Wacom tablets and such since it very closely matched what it was like to draw on paper. But there was a certain amount of disconnect since the drawing surface was separated from the actual image you saw. So it makes sense that the next step would be to draw directly onto the display.



The AIDE programming environment was more of a proof of concept video, rather than an actual methodology to programming. No, we cannot program effectively on tablets with touch / pen yet. However, I bet that we will one day create a UI design program on the tablet (drag and drop perhaps? Gesture based?) that is more natural.

At least, more natural for programming tablet applications.

There is a major advantage when you can do the whole compile / link / debug process on a single device. When the programming cycle becomes compile / link / upload / debug, you lose a bit of productivity.

Besides, many tablets support a dock by now. Transformer book, T100, Galaxy series... even iPads have those crappy Bluetooth keyboards that go kaput whenever the 2.4 GHz spectrum gets overloaded. (No seriously, a dock makes things much better).

So at the end of the day, yes, a tablet that is a tablet 99% of the time, but then you can just plug in a keyboard, or perhaps use a docking device, is frankly the future.

It is much easier to keep one master device, rather than a Tablet, Laptop, and Desktop. If one device can satisfy all of those without issue, then it will replace all three... much like how the Smartphone replaced the Rolodex, PDA and cellphone.


> No seriously, a dock makes things much better

Exactly. Which is why I said I doubt I'll ever give up my physical keyboard. It doesn't have to be attached... it just needs to be real (not virtual). :)

See my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7191779


You might want to check out our take on programming with touch-screens: https://vimeo.com/81458709




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