Portable Programming Rig

I’ve been using a Macbook Air as my main computer for a couple of years now, and I’ve generally been happy with the setup. The only real shortcoming of the Air was attempting to program while on away from my home office (and the external monitor). There just isn’t enough screen real estate on a Macbook Air for source code editor, test applications, and documentation simultaneously. While using Spaces can ameliorate the problem, it’s not a solution that works well for me.

The real “aha!” moment came with the introduction of Air Display for the iPad. For the low cost of $10, my iPad becomes a second (or third) monitor for my Mac and PC. I had a chance to test out the viability of mobile programming while at DevHouseDC-1. I did a little iPhone programming using the combination of the Macbook Air and iPad. Most of the main action stayed on the Air, but Apple iOS docs and a iPhone test instance both ran wirelessly on the iPad as external monitor. The results were fantastic, since the iPad support portrait and landscape use (dynamically), it was the perfect screen for documentation pages. Weird side effect, Air Display supports touchscreen input on the iPad, so I was testing my app in the emulator using touch input. I didn’t even notice what I was doing at the time, until someone pointed it out. Pretty surreal moment realizing you’re running touchscreen emulation on a touchscreen.

The combination of my Macbook Air (2010), iPad, and Air Display gets me more resolution than a 15″ Macbook Pro (even with the high resolution screen), and reasonably close to the pixel count of a 17″ Macbook pro (2.08M pixels vs. 2.30M pixels). The additional benefits of choosing the orientation of the screen and touch input probably even make up for most of the difference there. The whole package even comes in lighter than a 15″ Macbook pro, and I have the flexibility to leave either part at home if I don’t plan on doing any coding. Overall, I can highly recommend this setup to anyone who wants to do Mac/iOS development on the road, and it’s worth considering for any mobile coder.