“Between the hours of 8:30 and 8:45 this morning, I bought two things:
1) Breakfast, consisting of a wheat bagel and a Diet Coke. Purchase price: $1.74.
2) An iPad. Which cost me more than the breakfast.”
Dimitri Stancioff questions the lack of utility apps (Weather, Stocks, etc.) in the iPad demos and raises the possibility of a secret “Dashboard” app.
As a concept, multitasking goes beyond just background processes. There’s an aspect of multitasking which is purely visual. For example, when developing a website, I’ll often put the Photoshop file next to my browser, for comparison.
In a roundabout way, this means the iPad already has multitasking. Consider apps like Mail where, on the iPad, the list view and detail view have been combined to one screen. Users can not only read an email, but also instantly see when the previous email in that thread was sent, who sent it, and delete it—all without losing their place. To me, this is a form of multitasking. Extending this split screen idea to the app level presents a difficult UX challenge, but could be a better approach for multitasking than the typical “windowed” metaphor used on desktops.
There has been a lot of discussion over the past few weeks on whether or not the iPad (and iPhone for that matter) should support multitasking. Many people seem to have a different interpretation of what this means, whether it’s just listening to Pandora while browsing the web, having a faster way to switch apps running in the background (akin to WebOS’s concept of “cards”), or just having an app be able to fetch data in the background.
I’ll be posting some more thoughts on multitasking throughout the day, but first a quick poll: Do you want multitasking? Why or why not?
I know I posted a similar set earlier, but Flickr user, Designing Web Interfaces, has created a stunning collection of photos detailing iPad interactions.
iA has created a created an Omnigraffle stencil set for the iPad, based on the iPad GUI PSD from Teehan and Lax. Looks like a nice way to put simple screens together quickly.
Panelfly, a beautiful comic book app for the iPhone, has announced their plans to support the iPad. They’ve already mocked up a great selection of screens—each showing incredible attention to detail and level of innovation for a yet unreleased OS.
Fraser Speirs has created a Flickr set detailing all of the new iPad UI conventions, mostly culled from Apple’s promotional videos. There are a ton of elements caught in these screenshots that I haven’t seen anywhere else yet, like the scoreboard toggle for line spacing.
“The tiny iPhone icons look clumsy spread across the iPad’s large 9.7 inch Multi-Touch display—enough so, that Apple decided to throw in a photo of some mountains to fill up the empty space. Is this what “revolutionary” looks like?”
