On Multitasking
The iPhone evangelized the rather retro notion of running just one app at a time. And this has been mostly fine (though by no means excellent), given the screen size, and with workarounds like push notifications. The limits of these workarounds are more painfully exposed by the iPad’s giant screen: Switching out of a game or movie or email to dedicate the entire display to instant messaging feels absurd and wasteful, even considering that, in landscape mode, half the screen is dedicated to the keyboard.
What’s sad is that the kinds of things people commonly want multitasking for—mostly people who don’t even care what true “multitasking” means—seem simple enough, even for this operating system: Messaging, geolocation and playing music from apps like Pandora in the background. Even though Pandora makes beautiful use of all the room it’s granted, not being able run it in the background while surfing the web, typing out an email—or hey, sending an IM—just feels ridiculous in so many ways. Every time you have to close it to do something else, a little bubble of fury rises in your throat, erupting as a flustered sigh. I really can’t respond to my friend’s message without closing everything I’m doing on this huge thing? The choices you’re being forced to make feel false and arbitrary, like bacon or eggs.
The modal nature of push notifications stabs your brain harder too, like when your zombie slaying groove in Call of Duty is wrecked without warning by a little blue square that takes over your entire screen, informing you that a new IM is waiting. It just doesn’t work. At the very least, notifications need to be implemented very differently, because the iPad is meant to be immersive—and it really is—and to have that shredded by a workaround for capabilities it currently lacks, that’s kind of heartbreaking. Something like Growl, that’s unobtrusive, could work. (This will hopefully change with iPhone 4.0.)
The hardware constraints that made running one app at a time make sense are nearly obliterated in the iPad—the battery and screen are an order of magnitude larger, the processor markedly zippier. I suspect the remaining hardware cramp may now be the paltry amount of RAM in the iPad, a mere 256MB—the same amount that’s in the iPhone 3GS—but it doesn’t really matter why. As Apple’s fond of intoning, people just want it to do what they want it to do.
Put simply, the iPhone might not need multitasking. The iPad does.
Mimesis, or a Love Affair with Paper
For a blank slate that can magically transform into anything, Apple’s preoccupation with mimesis might seem a little curious. The Contacts app looks like a Moleskine address book while Calendar imitates a real-world datebook—though it functions so beautifully and smoothly it’s very possibly my favorite native app. iBooks uses a bookshelf metaphor that practically smells of rich mahogany, and books whose pages turn with a realistic animation that you can’t turn off. Ticking off messages in Mail stacks them like a pile of paper. In other words, Apple wants their apps to feel something like real-world experiences.
As Jesus noted, “Apple designed this device to be treated like a book,” and this carries through to any app that’s an abstraction of paper. Maybe it’s meant for your parents to feel more comfortable using the iPad to read books and organize their contacts and calendars, but the implementation of the realism feels so cheesy in some places that it’s simply not comforting, not even to that target audience, I suspect.
Typing
Yes, it’s pretty much a jumbo iPhone keyboard. (An idea that seemed so silly, we made fun of it.) We have been typing on the iPad in depth here, but simply put, an external keyboard is ideal. Still, as we noted earlier, the compromise here “is going to be inherent to all touchscreen keyboards on tablets.” There’s no novel solution, not for Apple or anyone else.
Related posts:
