When your SSH-ing into a Linux machine, it’s not really using your iPad as Dev machine. It’s using your iPad as a terminal. Slap a battery to a vt220 and you have the same (but way cooler)
Many of us spend all day remotely connected to another machine for development anyway. The line between “development machine” and “dumb terminal” might be more blurry than you think.
Since I do mostly remote server development, what matters to me on my “development machine” is the keyboard and software locally on the OS I’m running in front of me, not necessarily what is on the remote machine. If we define my AWS server as my “development machine” because that’s where the code is run, I don’t care one bit about the keyboard on my development machine, or the mail client on my development machine, and my development machine doesn’t even have Slack installed. But my “dumb terminal” $2000 Macbook Pro does, and that’s what actually matters.
Okay so I applaud the effort of turning these despicable consumption systems into production systems!
My idea is to approach it a little bit differently though. Not to rain on your parade or anything but why not simply use a regular notebook if this is the purpose.
So hear me out on this, I’m really aware that this is a longshot. Still there are no viable solutions to this, touch is basically two finger typing, whenever the voice recognition fails to recognize [ or * or { you’ll loose your flow whatever.
My idea is to scrap the keyboard structure as we now it and instead present the symbols dynamically using an efficient structure onscreen. This could be designed so that search gives us appropriate values from a Big-O notation point of view. So basically we are doing compression backwards.
I’ve worked some on this using single strokes and using a gamepad or whatever low key count input device. There is also the Dasher project that goes along similar lines.
I’m painfully aware that there’s an learning curve associated to this but then again what alternatives are there. Especially when VR is around the corner.
Am I crazy or should we try to invent some new paradigm of UI, to reclaim our devices as devices made for creativity instead of mind-numbing consumption devices?
Do you have any thoughts as to what that symbol representation would look like? I too think that especially with the ubiquity of touch interfaces (and especially potential VR interfaces in the future) it’s worth exploring alternate paradigms for input. So far it seems that either we haven’t come up with anything better for controlling the incredible power of computing than something that is basically a computer text terminal, or else if we have, these ideas have been snuffed out by the terminal in “Worse is Better” fashion.
Yes I have two angles of attack at the moment when it comes to creating streams of symbols. My own idea is based on a discrete categorization of the symbols sorted by frequency. Either as recursive grids or as trees, which more or less is the same when you think of it as graphs.
The second approach
I got some brilliant feedback from lobsters when I published my silly game. This was concerning the Dasher input method. Here we are dealing with the same fundamentals, N-signal input where N is low, feed it into a prediction model with compressing characteristics. The difference here is that he is taking the continuous approach and using arithmetic compression instead of a huffman encoding.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ie9Se7FneXE
** What I am working on now **
At the moment I’m doing an implementation in nim which is supposed to span several platforms and to be as universal as possible. A lot of work has to be done to interface to existing program, create frequency profiles from text and so forth. While supporting several platforms. I think it’s essential to have a web demo that corresponds quite closely to the actual variant.
My current target is to create an editor loosely based on vim. With two input systems, one that handles text input as a stream and the other one handles control of the text. So given a game pad setup, the left stick might represent input of text/code and the right one would correspond to the “command mode” of VIM.
** Organisation Cooperation **
My dream is to set up some small group of people who are prepared to think outside of the box and set up a forum or discord server to cooperate on this!!
That does sound interesting! I’m certainly not an expert on the subject, but I do find it fascinating (probably related although more traditional: I’ve spent a lot of time building small mechanical keyboards for myself and customizing the keycaps in qmk.) I’d certainly enjoy looking into it further.
Lovely, I’ve set up a discord server just now as a first step of trying to organize the effort. Perhaps discord isn’t the ideal solution for organizing stuff like this.
I made a few – admittedly half-hearted – attempts to use my iPad as my main machine (just to see how it would work out).
By far the biggest obstacle was having to constantly reach up and paw at the screen. For many people, like me, iOS can never be their main machine unless iOS gets mouse support. In my experience, Apple can be very deeply stubborn about things, though, so I’m not counting on iOS ever getting mouse support.
I think an Android tablet would have a better shot at being a main machine (including for development). Support for way, way more external devices (including mice), local development tools, etc.
When your SSH-ing into a Linux machine, it’s not really using your iPad as Dev machine. It’s using your iPad as a terminal. Slap a battery to a vt220 and you have the same (but way cooler)
Many of us spend all day remotely connected to another machine for development anyway. The line between “development machine” and “dumb terminal” might be more blurry than you think.
Since I do mostly remote server development, what matters to me on my “development machine” is the keyboard and software locally on the OS I’m running in front of me, not necessarily what is on the remote machine. If we define my AWS server as my “development machine” because that’s where the code is run, I don’t care one bit about the keyboard on my development machine, or the mail client on my development machine, and my development machine doesn’t even have Slack installed. But my “dumb terminal” $2000 Macbook Pro does, and that’s what actually matters.
does it matter what text editor, shell, and compiler are installed on your development machine?
Okay so I applaud the effort of turning these despicable consumption systems into production systems!
My idea is to approach it a little bit differently though. Not to rain on your parade or anything but why not simply use a regular notebook if this is the purpose.
So hear me out on this, I’m really aware that this is a longshot. Still there are no viable solutions to this, touch is basically two finger typing, whenever the voice recognition fails to recognize [ or * or { you’ll loose your flow whatever.
My idea is to scrap the keyboard structure as we now it and instead present the symbols dynamically using an efficient structure onscreen. This could be designed so that search gives us appropriate values from a Big-O notation point of view. So basically we are doing compression backwards.
I’ve worked some on this using single strokes and using a gamepad or whatever low key count input device. There is also the Dasher project that goes along similar lines.
I’m painfully aware that there’s an learning curve associated to this but then again what alternatives are there. Especially when VR is around the corner.
Am I crazy or should we try to invent some new paradigm of UI, to reclaim our devices as devices made for creativity instead of mind-numbing consumption devices?
Do you have any thoughts as to what that symbol representation would look like? I too think that especially with the ubiquity of touch interfaces (and especially potential VR interfaces in the future) it’s worth exploring alternate paradigms for input. So far it seems that either we haven’t come up with anything better for controlling the incredible power of computing than something that is basically a computer text terminal, or else if we have, these ideas have been snuffed out by the terminal in “Worse is Better” fashion.
Yes I have two angles of attack at the moment when it comes to creating streams of symbols. My own idea is based on a discrete categorization of the symbols sorted by frequency. Either as recursive grids or as trees, which more or less is the same when you think of it as graphs.
The first one implemented as a game
http://sigma.eruditenow.com/theory.html http://sigma.eruditenow.com/index.html
I also have a series of videos on the subject over at bitchute: [introduction] https://www.bitchute.com/video/FklGhgQGbuDk/ [comparation between classic and trees] https://www.bitchute.com/video/FklGhgQGbuDk/
The second approach I got some brilliant feedback from lobsters when I published my silly game. This was concerning the Dasher input method. Here we are dealing with the same fundamentals, N-signal input where N is low, feed it into a prediction model with compressing characteristics. The difference here is that he is taking the continuous approach and using arithmetic compression instead of a huffman encoding. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ie9Se7FneXE
** What I am working on now ** At the moment I’m doing an implementation in nim which is supposed to span several platforms and to be as universal as possible. A lot of work has to be done to interface to existing program, create frequency profiles from text and so forth. While supporting several platforms. I think it’s essential to have a web demo that corresponds quite closely to the actual variant.
My current target is to create an editor loosely based on vim. With two input systems, one that handles text input as a stream and the other one handles control of the text. So given a game pad setup, the left stick might represent input of text/code and the right one would correspond to the “command mode” of VIM.
** Organisation Cooperation ** My dream is to set up some small group of people who are prepared to think outside of the box and set up a forum or discord server to cooperate on this!!
Inteested?
That does sound interesting! I’m certainly not an expert on the subject, but I do find it fascinating (probably related although more traditional: I’ve spent a lot of time building small mechanical keyboards for myself and customizing the keycaps in qmk.) I’d certainly enjoy looking into it further.
Lovely, I’ve set up a discord server just now as a first step of trying to organize the effort. Perhaps discord isn’t the ideal solution for organizing stuff like this.
https://discord.gg/8sPDxRa
I made a few – admittedly half-hearted – attempts to use my iPad as my main machine (just to see how it would work out).
By far the biggest obstacle was having to constantly reach up and paw at the screen. For many people, like me, iOS can never be their main machine unless iOS gets mouse support. In my experience, Apple can be very deeply stubborn about things, though, so I’m not counting on iOS ever getting mouse support.
I think an Android tablet would have a better shot at being a main machine (including for development). Support for way, way more external devices (including mice), local development tools, etc.
ugly keyboard
similar raspberry pi as developer machine ;) not for normal working.
Good keyboard have psion https://jm.iq.pl/psion-5mx-z-linuxem-na-pokladzie/ but too slow processor. Meybe in future when folding screen will be popular
Do you know about the Gemeni and Cosmo from Planet Computers ? I’d love to see one up close.
yes, and GOLE1 and similar I’m from Poland I need AltGr key for my language chars. Gemini,cosmo planet not have
This is very ugly keyboard for non latin writers (developers too) Ideal keyboard = https://klawiatura.wordpress.com/ ;) but is too big for me