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How Multitasking Could be Done

I really like this concept a lot. I agree using the double click home button is clunky, but mostly overdone! You can't have like 8 different options for the double home button, because some people will want to access all of them easily! I personally like to keep it to my favorites.

As mentioned the maps app would make this implementation quite difficult.... so apple would need to develop some sort of a work around. like perhaps you could touch an icon to "freeze" the map and then "zoom out".

I am all for lots of different multitouch gestures. in safari, two finger swipe to forward/backward. maybe same to go "back" in different menus. Maybe three finger swipe for expose. or swipe in different directions for different features. Honestly even a 4 finger swipe would be possible (even on the iphone). But I'd be happy if they just started warming us up with some 2 and 3 finger swiping.... :)
 
I honestly thought I already made a thread on this but I hadn't haha. But yea, I agree, that would be pretty cool. Although I would be OK with it for just being used to change windows within safari, because the whole clicking an icon thing gets tedious.
 
Nice idea.

I was never one to really be bothered by not having multitasking...never really needed it, until yesterday. I was on YouTube...and the video was pretty long and was loading slow...slow enough that the video itself was catching up to the loading time, so I had to press pause and wait for it to load.

Would have been great to be able to go to another app while the video loaded and then come back to it.
 
I like double tapping on status bar to invoke pr0switcher, but that doesn't work for games.
 
macbookairman said:
I was just thinking that. Pinch with a thumb and two fingers. Seems like that would work.
Click to expand...

Except other apps are perfectly free to uses this gesture, and some already probably do. There might be apps where this is appropriate for something and the problem is Apple can't possibly predict what apps people will make and what gestures they might require. There are gestures that are de facto standard for certain things (pinch-zoom) and some UI widgets use others (swipe to initiate delete), but Apple basically leaves the interpretation of multi touches up to the developer, which I think is right.
 
On the iPad, a four-finger-swipe-down would work perfectly, I've used it enough now on my unibody macbook that it's just muscle memory.

However, I don't think that what we're going to see on Thursday is full desktop style multitasking. Maybe later, but I don't think Apple is going to take that sort of huge leap, just a few small controlled steps in that direction.

There will probably be a few fairly restrictive APIs that allow developers to do things like leave a background process running that provides audio through the existing iPod mechanism (only one app at a time could do this), which would take care of Pandora et al. Maybe also some APIs to allow things like backgound file downloads.

They definitely won't do it in a way that isn't clear to the user. Look at how the phone and voice recorder behave when running in the background with the glowing titlebar.
 
Firstly, pinching wouldn't work since it is already used by other apps for various things.

Secondly, it would make more sense for Apple to keep gestures similar across multiple products. So perhaps dragging four fingers down the screen opens expose.
 
HiRez said:
That's why I think we will see a more limited, restricted form of multitasking (along with battery life concerns). As an alternate to actually having all those apps running simultaneously, you could still use some similar system for fast app switching, which would be faster than exiting to the home screen in-between every time. But, maybe those background apps are asked to sleep while they are in the background, or throttled back. If the RAM gets full, maybe they are asked to save state and quit, but the user wouldn't necessarily have to know this as the mechanism could cache an image and seamlessly re-awaken it as it swaps out other apps. As I said before, this stuff is really, really difficult to do well and there are many inhibiting factors.
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Some form of virtual memory could be employed to boost the base RAM capacity.
 
colmaclean said:
Some form of virtual memory could be employed to boost the base RAM capacity.
Click to expand...

I think that Apple are trying to avoid this. Firstly there are the practical problems of using flash for virtual memory, such as whether the write performance is good enough and whether the limited number of write cycles would cause problems.

Secondly, and I think more importantly, virtual memory introduces unexpected slow downs into the user experience as stuff is moved between virtual and main memory. These random delays will break up the fluidity that Apple appear to have created on the iPad. A possible workaround for this would be to only swap out entire apps; however I'm not sure that gets you that much more than explicitly asking the app to save it's state and quit.
 
Fraaaa said:
Here is what I was saying before. I made a keynote that explain how the multitask will work for me. :D
Click to expand...

Might want to work on having the iPad download apps as well since I have to switch computers to see your attachment
 
Didn't read entire thread but just have a multi screen page icon liken safari has to get multiple pages to go back and forth with to variety of tasks. Would this not work
 
HiRez said:
That's why I think we will see a more limited, restricted form of multitasking (along with battery life concerns). As an alternate to actually having all those apps running simultaneously, you could still use some similar system for fast app switching, which would be faster than exiting to the home screen in-between every time. But, maybe those background apps are asked to sleep while they are in the background, or throttled back. If the RAM gets full, maybe they are asked to save state and quit, but the user wouldn't necessarily have to know this as the mechanism could cache an image and seamlessly re-awaken it as it swaps out other apps. As I said before, this stuff is really, really difficult to do well and there are many inhibiting factors.
Click to expand...

I really think people are making way too much of that 256Mb of RAM issue. The Palm Pre only has 256Mb and it could multitask fine (up to a sensible-ish point at least). Far more important will be the fact that ALL apps to this point are written for a single active application OS rather than a multitasking one so have always been able to guarantee a base level of resources for the application to use.

For that reason I can see Apple doing something like this: A small limit on concurrent applications, say three or four max. When you press the home button the OS basically dumps the app to a portion of the built in memory reserved for the purpose. It also takes a snapshot image of the app which is held in memory. If there are already four apps 'stored' in that reserved space the oldest is closed. When you next click an app it launches in the the exact same state it closed in. If you want to multitask ala desktop OS X then swipe down with four fingers. The OS splits the screen into quarters and puts the current app in the top left, filling the rest with the snapshot images of the apps that are 'running'. It also starts pre-loading whatever it can from the stored applications to minimise load time when the user selects an app.

There'd also have to be a requirement to provide some form of hook to let an app perform a task in the background without being the active application for stuff like internet radio or IM clients. Basically a 'mini app' and that WOULD need to be built around a very strict set of guidelines.

The above is horribly basic and there'd be a lot of very large and significant technical issues to overcome but it's the best way I could see of providing this functionality. Plus it'd scale perfectly for both the iPad and the smaller devices. It'd have to be a function limited to just the 3GS, third gen iPod Touch and iPad of course (plus the new hardware). Thing is, Apple don't NEED to provide full-on desktop multitasking, just the basic illusion of it so that you can do things quicker and with more flexibility but not to the point that you cripple your device by running dozens of apps.
 
My Jailbroken phone has an expose app to jump to specific springboard pages, and there are various ways to activate it. One of the methods is with those pinch gestures. On the SpringBoard its tricky to register that input and many times it just starts scrolling the app pages instead.
 
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