Right, it sends the message that the developer is better served by using a Mac, or that the Vision Pro is not capable. Maybe that was honest/intentional?
It’s got a full M2 and (reportedly) 16 GB of RAM. In theory it’s capable.
That doesn’t mean Apple will expose that. Maybe just not today. The original iPhone had a full OS capable of multitasking but it wasn’t a feature given to the user due to memory and battery constraints. We’ve now had it for years.
This was the first we’ve seen of it, and I suspect the on device development story was not one they wanted to spend limited time on. Plus knowing Apple it seems likely they’d want to make Xcode work better for the interface than just plopping the Mac app in.
Time will tell. The iPad can do development. Apple has proven it with Swift Playgrounds. But they still haven’t given us Xcode. So who knows.
> Time will tell. The iPad can do development. Apple has proven it with Swift Playgrounds. But they still haven’t given us Xcode. So who knows.
Apple announced just before WWDC the iPadOS versions of Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro, their professional media creation tools. We've all seen shows and listed to music (and podcasts) created with these tools. While most of the core functionality is the same between the Mac and iPadOS versions, the iPad versions take advantage of multitouch and other iPadOS features, as they should.
> Plus knowing Apple it seems likely they’d want to make Xcode work better for the interface than just plopping the Mac app in.
Yes; that's how Apple does things.
As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, iPad users can already use Swift Playgrounds to code and submit an app to the App Store [1].
It's just a matter of time before there will be a version of Xcode for the iPad.
Final Cut Pro has significant limitations over what can be done on the Mac, which limits their ability to do project sharing between the two platforms.
Thats nothing compared to the bash build stages and custom permission setups, third party libraries, bespoke source code management scripts, ruby-based project initialization and preprocessing scripts I've seen amongst Xcode-based projects.
When those fail, you are troubleshooting through logs and at the filesystem level.
If the idea is a version of Xcode without those things but is otherwise fully featured, I think that is actually speaking about some future version of Swift Playgrounds.
Otherwise, "Xcode for iPad" is basically a jailed Mac VM.
apple is so determined to prevent any serious code execution that even ssh apps require janky workarounds just to provide a terminal emulation that still needs a second device to communicate with just to do any real work
