I’ll say up front that this post is aimed at those looking to do web coding/design on their iPads, which is a non-trivial problem and is solved very well by a great app called Textastic. Here’s my experience with it:
Whenever I travel for longer than a few days, I generally keep an daily online journal of my adventures not only for the friends and family back home but also for my own personal reflection later on. For years I’d have to have my MacBook with me, dragging it from stop to stop and dealing with the fallout of a damaged laptop on the road. Recently however, I’ve been content to travel simply with my iOS devices, first traveling with my iPhone and writing journal entries from there and now with my iPad.
Since the days leading up to my trips are quite hectic, I do very little to prepare my site for another online journal, opting instead to do the backend WordPress theme coding on the road. In order to do it on my iPhone, I used an app called FTPontheGo, which was a pretty clunky and limited solution. On my most recent trip however, a very talented developer named Alexander Blach provided me with a promo code of Textastic, an advanced text editor for the iPad. As someone who has tried to do coding in plaintext on an iPhone, I can personally speak to the merits of Textastic’s highly useful syntax highlighting, which made editing my WordPress PHP a breeze.
In addition to connecting to my site’s FTP server, Textastic also allowed me to connect to Dropbox, which served as an intermediary between the photos on my phone and the iPad. Textastic has a wide variety of different connectivity options and is highly customizable. My only complaint is that the connectivity window is a bit difficult to find at first, but once you’ve found it, everything works without a problem (its the little globe in the bottom left hand corner).
But the best part of Textastic is how well it integrates within iOS – it is so well implemented and so well designed, that it almost looks like a native application, particularly with the paned views and animations. Although I just used the app once I got it, the Textastic manual can be a great resource for learning about all of the features.
So if you need to do some coding on the go, I highly recommend Textastic for iPad.