We know by now that multitasking is a myth. Yes, your computer can do it very well, but you are not a computer. You are a human being, and you can't really multitask (even if you tell me that you can, I won't believe you).
Now, iPhone OS is actually perfectly capable of multitasking, and it does run many processes in the background, but the one-application-at-a-time choice is a UI experiment. It is the idea that people can only do one thing at a time applied. There are certainly cases for leaving running applications in the background, but those are mostly limited to power-users.
As a developer I need to be running a shell and a text editor and a database server all at the same time, but anybody can stop watching a YouTube video to write an email.
There a couple of tasks where multitasking makes a lot of sense for even non-power-users. The huge one being to play music in the background, either via my mp3 player or streaming via my webbrowser. The other one being skype and chat programs. Someone sends you a link on skype and you don't want to shut down your chat session to look at the page. Even if Apple won't go full multitasking, perhaps they will allow some sort of selective multitasking based on tasks where it makes sense.
Yeah, I would really like it if they'd let third party alarm clock apps relaunch themselves at the right time. Or if they'd just add playing music as an option to the built in alarm clock. It seems crazy that there's no way to do this but leave the phone in the alarm clock app, plugged in all night.
Correct. App Store apps (including Apple's own) are sent a signal when the user presses the Home button. They then have a small number of seconds to persist whatever state they need to. Some nice apps are like Tweetie: it saves (most of) the current state of the UI so that when you come back, they reopen right where they had been. Apparently iWork for iPad does the same.
Makes one wonder whether the Cocoa Touch frameworks could help with that some...
I am filling a web form on Safari/iPhone and I need to enter 3 emergency contact phone numbers (relative, friend1, friend2). I don't remember all the numbers but I have them in my phone's contact list. How can I do this on iPhone/iPad if it doesn't let me run two apps at once?
It seems like they could improve that case by selectively allowing objects to be transferred from one place to another. The Address Book API already allows apps to pop up a people picker and choose contact details from it. It's too bad Safari doesn't use this. A general solution would allow apps to advertise the data that they want make available between applications.
When you come back to Safari, the page will still be there, with form fields as they were. [Though if the device runs low on memory in the interim, it may send a low-memory warning signal to Safari, which causes it to dump the current states of your pages.]
We tried life without multitasking. It sucked. It turns out there are a number of cases where multitasking helps especially when networked. I guess you can makes special cases for Email, Twitter, Instant Messaging, and Music however it starts to seem silly.
The need to preserving state alone necessitates multitasking. When you quit an app you lose your application state. Checking your email shouldn't require losing your application state.
Apart from preserving state, being able to do things like track where I'm going via GPS AND check my Tweets are things people benefit from.
You know, I have to disagree. Without application multitasking, the iPad won't even replace the laptop that stays in my living room -- sure, I mostly surf the web, but I'm also running (multi-protocol) IM and IRC all the time and I want them to stay connected in the background.
I do realize that there's always BeeJive for the IM portion of my requirements, but I always thought that keeping your connection alive through a proxy server was an ugly hack that was only necessary due to the limitations in iPhone OS. That and I dislike sharing my login credentials with a third party server.
I also have to say (as an iPhone owner) that I really kind of hate the app switching experience as it stands now. I want an instantaneous switch -- more or less like alt-tab on Linux or Windows -- and waiting for the springboard to reappear and then for whatever new app to load kind of gets on my nerves, especially if I'm trying to bounce between reading an e-book in Stanza or reading a web page and a slow-moving IM conversation. This is one reason why I'm ditching my iPhone 3G for a Nexus One as soon as they're available on Verizon. It's also why I find the Android tablets that are in development, like the MSI Harmony, much more appealing than the iPad: Android multitasks.
But I do also recognize I'm not the iPad's target market.
On a somewhat unrelated note, I suspect a lot of the iPad hate, particularly regarding no multitasking, isn't so much the idea of making a device that normal people can use so much as it is the idea that this is the sum total of the future of computing: specialized devices that uni-task, attempt to lock us into specific content providers, lock up our data in apps rather than letting us have free access to the file system, and so on. In other words -- it's not so much about what it currently is, but rather the potential future it represents. I think those fears are a bit overblown, but I definitely empathize with them. I'd hate having a computer that (for example) forced me to use iPhoto or Aperture or Lightroom or Picasa to manage my photos rather than just keeping them in a nicely organized file structure that I created.
But at any rate, I think there's room enough in computing for both approaches and I don't understand why various groups on both sides seem so anxious to strip those choices away from everyone else. Which is to say: I don't think anyone who is confused by a file system or windowed multitasking is a drooling idiot who shouldn't be allowed to use the Internet, but I also don't appreciate the simplicity advocates telling me that I should get over it because I don't need the ability to multi-task or be able to see multiple programs at once anyway. There's room for both approaches and I suspect there'll always be a need for both.
Multi-taksing is no myth. Maybe I can't multitask but while I'm doing something in the foreground I sure as hell want my computer to be multiasking the following in the background;
downloading something(s) in the background, checking on my alarms, grabbing new emails|tweets|im's|sms's|RSS, 5min back in time continuous video/audio record, looking up what I type and search ala Rememberance agent, streaming my GPS location (and one day heartrate, bloodpressure other vital stats) to my server, and many, many more things.
Quit being limited by your simple single task mind.
We know by now that multitasking is a myth. Yes, your computer can do it very well, but you are not a computer. You are a human being, and you can't really multitask (even if you tell me that you can, I won't believe you).
Now, iPhone OS is actually perfectly capable of multitasking, and it does run many processes in the background, but the one-application-at-a-time choice is a UI experiment. It is the idea that people can only do one thing at a time applied. There are certainly cases for leaving running applications in the background, but those are mostly limited to power-users.
As a developer I need to be running a shell and a text editor and a database server all at the same time, but anybody can stop watching a YouTube video to write an email.