Tablets have only been around in their present form for a few months. This particular tablet has been around for a few hours. Don't you think it's a bit too early to argue about what "typical tasks" on them will be?
Give it some time before suggesting you know exactly how users will use their tablets.
Yah, I am pretty sure in the next year or two we will see that most typical use case for tablets will be vi/emacs, not
web browsing, e-books and consumption of information in general.
On the serious note, I am pretty sure single-app-for-single task will be dominant paradigm on tablets.
And just take a look at some features of OS X 10.7…
Are you seriously suggesting that switching apps makes you more productive?
I was responding to your post above, specifically you said
> I'd argue typical tasks on them involve only single app
I think that's absolutely ridiculous. I don't know about "productivity" since even defining that is a bit vague. I'm not trying to comment on productivity.
I'm suggesting that most users will be multitasking frequently on their tablets; or they might not be and it's just too early to know either way! Take for example what I expect to be a pretty typical use case.
You pull your tablet out and start watching YouTube videos. You've got one app open now - YouTube. An email notification comes in from a friend, it's about a funny incident found on Street View (or something). So you click on the link. You've now got three apps open: Gmail, YouTube, and Maps. The email distracted you from the YouTube video, so now that you're done with streetview you hit up HN. Four apps.
Maybe you'll go back to the YouTube video. How will you do that? On iOS you have to leave the current app - I think, I don't own any iOS devices - then slide around your homescreen until you find YouTube, then open it up.
The idea behind Android 3.0's multitasking is that you have an easy-to-access list of running applications and tasks.
I'm not suggesting people will be seriously coding on Android tablets anytime soon (but that'll happen eventually...), but I think it's pretty clear that users will very much enjoy having many things going at the same time.
In my quote I say typical task will involve only one app.
Your example does not contradict that: checking email is different task from watching youtube.
On iOS you press home button twice, and tap on Youtube app, it will nicely swap places with whatever you have open.
I don't argue that multitasking (in OS sense) is bad. I argue that multitasking as a way for human to deal with tasks is actually less productive.
> "I don't argue that multitasking (in OS sense) is bad. I argue that multitasking as a way for human to deal with tasks is actually less productive."
Oh, so you aren't saying much then, just equivocating terms throughout the conversation. Please stop.
> "Your example does not contradict that: checking email is different task from watching youtube."
The way your personal ontology cuts the vast range of human computing endeavors into "task" units does not interest me (nor, I suspect, many people in these threads). What does interest me is my own (and their own to them). As the start of this thread clearly pointed out, the computing field learned many years back the lesson of computer multitasking. It enables a decoupling of the computer's task ontology and the user's task ontology. That is good for users, and they, like me, generally like it (as clearly evidenced by their behavior).
If you haven't been intentionally arguing for the equivalent of "being able to get more than one tool out of the toolbox at once is not helpful", then your equivocation on terms (which implied that as your position) has been noise in the conversation.
iOS (and apparently Lion) deemphasize the users' awareness and involvement in the concept of which apps are "open" and which aren't. iOS already has a popup "multitasking bar" that lets you switch right back to the apps you most recently used. When you switch back they either immediately resume running or deserialize their state back from storage - and the user generally can't (and doesn't need to be able to) distinguish between the two.
> Are you seriously suggesting that switching apps makes you more productive?
Yes, that's what practically everyone here is saying. Are you seriously suggesting that the ability to switch between two concurrently running applications will somehow make you less productive?
dude seriously, come on. imagine video chatting with your family and then you get sent a link. i want the video chat to the running in the background while i look at the link whether it be youtube, a map, or just a plain old text page.
