Jason Snell on Working on iOS
Jason Snell details some of the issues he has when he tries to work on an iPad. The first is about not being able to do regular expression searches:
I complained about not being able to do grep searches in my iOS text editors of choice, and while that’s true, several people pointed out that there are iOS apps that are capable of them, most notably Coda by Panic and Textastic Code Editor 7. I own both of these apps and while I don’t like writing articles using them—they’re development tools more than writing tools—they absolutely support grep and I will use them in the future when I need to do pattern-matching searches on iOS.
The second is missing BBEdit’s “Sort Lines” feature:
I also lamented the lack of BBEdit’s Sort Lines feature in any of my chosen iOS text editors. I still don’t have an answer for this, though I get the distinct sense that if I spent a few hours teaching myself a bit more JavaScript I could figure out how to write some scripts for 1Writer that would do the trick.
On the one hand you can look at this as a silly exercise in masochism; grep and sort are some of the original Unix utilities and are 44 and 47 years old respectively. But it’s the underlying message here that is actually flawed. Posts like this seem to be saying “just a couple of more features and iOS will be ready for real work”. But that’s not the way it works. People aren’t avoiding working on the iPad because it’s missing a couple of features, they are avoiding it because it’s a worse paradigm for working. How do we know it’s worse? Because the best stuff happens early.