iPad/iPhone: Thinking of multitasking in a new way

Tailored Multitasking

One of the criticisms of the iPad is the assertion that it doesn’t support multitasking. Of course the facts are that it really does but it is restricted to some core Apple apps. For performance, battery and other reasons it is likely that a new form of multitasking will be enforced with tradeoffs optimized for the unique characteristics of a mobile battery powered device with a certain size screen. For instance on an iPhone or an iPod touch it doesn’t really make sense to support multiple windows when the screen is only large enough to show one window at a time. Milind Alvares discusses these items in his blog on iPhone and iPad multitasking.

Workflows

To me the key issue is support for workflows. If apps have persistence of their previous state and I can switch between them quickly and transfer data easily that is really what I want for the most often used multitasking use case. For example, on the iPhone, in some twitter clients when I click a link I go to Safari and as far as I know there is no way to easily and quickly go back – not nice. Switching between different apps can still be done by pressing home and then tapping/launching the other app if that app home screen happens to be up. If it isn’t then switching screens is required if you haven’t yet put the apps on the same screen. Tweetie 2 solves this elegantly by showing the web page in the app itself so I can easily and intuitively get back to the tweet where I came from. Since it is not always advisable or possible to have an all in one app it would be highly desirable to me to have something equivalent to command-tab application switching to be able to quickly switch between two apps. Since the iPhone-iPad is gesture based there would need to be a different UI that is intuitive and simple enough that it wouldn’t be inadvertently invoked. Perhaps one way this could be done is to have an app setting for a switch button that would be configurable to switch to an application of your choice. While this might work it seems that this should be somehow implemented as a system capability rather than it being application specific.

Maybe Just One

Another multitasking use case, where there is a need for a third party app like Pandora to play music in the background for example, could potentially be accommodated by allowing one background app at a time with a restricted processing allocation. This gives the user the tradeoff of having the choice of some additional multitasking freedom while not reducing the performance or battery life too much. This type of multitasking is not as important for me for the applications I can think of right now so I wouldn’t want to have performance or battery life affected much but that could be a choice of just not using it if I didn’t like the tradeoff. Best to keep an open mind though on how useful this might be because who knows what compelling types of applications could be developed if this option was made available.

Maybe its Us that Needs the Update

An interesting part of the iPad commentary is how vociferous people are on how the iPad is changing the computing status quo. Maybe some of these perceived faults could be blessings once people get used to the change. It is sometimes possible that less is more and the simplicity of leaving out some capabilities is actually beneficial. This might apply to multitasking in that studies have shown that workflows can be improved if people focus on one thing at a time and finish each item before moving on to something else. Craig explains this point of view in iPad liberation.

Update (2010-02-11):

TidBITS does its usual thorough treatment on Apple computing to analyze the topic of multitasking. It covers the different types of multitasking and also zeroes in on the main issues including the necessary system UI update for fast switching.

Application developers like the Omnigroup are taking things into their own hands by distributing application code for interworking with their OmniFocus app.