Using an iPad Pro to do Actual Work
I have spent the last couple days using a 9.7" iPad Pro with a Smart Keyboard as my only computing device. In this post, I am going to talk about the tools I use to make full use of the iPad, and then I’m going to describe a scientific computing task.
The Tools I Use
First, a confession: I still rely on my laptop — I keep it on in my room and use it as a server. As such, the first tool I looked for was a good SSH client. Since I use the command line and vim for most of my programming tasks, this is pretty optimal for me.
I ended up choosing Cathode. I briefly considered Prompt 2. Prompt 2 costs $14.99, so it was too expensive for me. However, Cathode isn’t optimized for the most recent iOS. It is also billed as a retro-looking SSH client. However, you can turn off a lot of the retro features.
It’s easy to connect to my laptop (running macOS Sierra). I had to enable remote access on my laptop by going to System Preferences > Sharing and enabling Remote Login.
Here’s a screenshot of Cathode:
Dropbox
A majority of my personal files live on my Dropbox account. I use the Dropbox app to have access to my files without having to go through SSH. I also use the Dropbox app for scanning documents and for reading PDFs.
Workflow
Workflow is an automation app. It lets me write scripts to do common iPad tasks in sequence (standard programming control flow is available), which has and will continue to save me time.
A Scientific Computing Task
I’m currently finishing up a project for a class. I had to use MATLAB to make some plots. I also wanted to put the plots into my iPad’s camera roll so that I could examine them.
First, I SSH’d into my laptop using Cathode, ran the MATLAB CLI, generated a plot, and saved it to my Dropbox folder. Next, I wrote this workflow script. Here’s a screenshot of the script:
This takes the figure (a PNG image) from a fixed path in my Dropbox folder, saves the image to my camera roll, and then deletes the image from my Dropbox folder. I next added the script to the Workflow widget for easy access. So, after saving the plot to my Dropbox folder using MATLAB and Cathode, I ran the script from the widget, and the plot appeared in my camera roll.
I’ve been able to get a lot done with these three apps. The only thing hampering my productivity is Picture in Picture Twitch, but that’s my fault.
