A Trip to Blacksburg (or Can I Work on an iPad?) 

I took a trip to Blacksburg last weekend to see some friends and check out a VT game. It was my first time back in over 5 years, but I knew it was going to be a short weekend. Fly in on Friday night, hang out all day Saturday, then fly back out on Sunday morning. With such a short window, I didn't want to bring a lot with me. The big question: iPad or laptop.

I decided that I would be able to make it over a weekend with just the iPad and a keyboard. I have a VPN client and a couple of ssh apps; in a pinch, I could hop online and get some work done.

And, wouldn't you know it, first thing Saturday morning, some scripts didn't finish and needed to get checked out. With Prompt ¹ and the Apple Bluetooth keyboard, I made quick work of it.

This got me thinking about whether or not I could do most of my job on an iPad with a keyboard. My job, these days, is a lot of email, web apps, and a little bit of programming. All very very possible on the iPad. The only thing that I think might not be convenient on the iPad is our jabber/IM setup. We have a pretty massive contact list and I have yet to find an app that handles it well.

But, my experience last weekend, combined with iOS 7 (background apps), makes me thinks it might be worth a shot one day to just grab a keyboard and my iPad and see how effective I can be.

In that vein, I've been typing this in Editorial ² – on the built-in soft keyboard on they iPad. Not my fastest typing, but it's manageable. And, if all goes well, this will get posted directly out of Editorial, using one of the workflows that's available on Editorial's workflow site.

If it doesn't go well, it's very likely to be my fault setting up the Wordpress workflow in Editorial. ³