In my relentless pursuit to be a little more productive, I’ve been looking at ways that I might be able to do some basic HTML and other associated web development via the iPad. I think I’ve made some efforts in the past before, but I was limited by the iPads functionality (especially in terms of the keyboard and screen real estates) but mostly by my own very limited understanding of what I was trying to do.
Now, though, I think that I’ve come up with a solution that works pretty well. Here’s what I’ve been doing. My plan was to be able to code my new personal website (drheggart.com) via the iPad. However, I also wanted the files to be associated with a cloud, so I could access them form either my home computer or somewhere else as needed
Text Editor: Textastic
The first step was finding a decent text editor to work on the iPad. I’ve played around with a few of these, but in terms fo easy of use, Textastic was the winner for me. It’s not particularly flashy, and I am sure there are features that more advanced programmers might like, but it words for me. The good news is that it also links with Working Copy (see below).
Repo: Github
For my version control software, I gravitated towards github – mostly because i knew that it would work well with working copy, and if I could get it to work with Working Copy, I could use Textastic.
Connecting the two: Working Copy
Finally, I needed a way to make sure that any changes I made to the files could be pushed to a Github remote repository (as above), so that I could pull the changes down to my local repository on my Mac, should I be working on that. Fortunately, the solution was straightforward: use the App working copy, which effectively links the two. The only problem is that Working Copy is not cheap – about $30.