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Will iOS ever have alternate launcher support? It makes Android a chameleon that can look and behave any way. Also, the "intents" system that allows the appropiate app to take over at any time is powerful.

Can someone please explain to me why this was modded down?

I'm curious, as I am unaware of the Apple multitasking history. (Had an 8086, and an Apple II at school; never encountered apple again until after I got an iPod and then an iPhone)

Recently someone compared weird downvotes to cosmic rays. They are going to strike but they are mostly harmless. Upvote back and carry on.

On topic: I’m not sure whether architectural decisions hamper iOS multitasking – it seems to me that the UI for multitasking in iOS just isn’t very good [0]. There are some edge cases where true multitasking would be great but I think that Apple is for the most part facing an UI problem, not an architectural problem.

[0] There isn’t much of a multitasking UI, actually. There is this horribly inaccessible row of recently accessed app icons and nothing else. If only it weren’t beneath Apple to shamelessly copy WebOS or Android.

I suspect most people never noticed the addition of multitasking in iOS. Suddenly Pandora didn't stop playing when they checked a mail message and their apps reopened much faster, but they probably credited/blamed the app developers for that. I wonder what percentage of users don't even know about the double-click-home menu.

I think multitasking UIs on touch devices (where apps are usually 100% of the screen) are more confusing for users than just going back to the icon on the home screen. Users get that more than one thing is running at a time in a windowed environment -- you can see both of them at the same time if you position your windows properly. I'm not sure they bring that understanding along when they pick up a tablet.

I don't totally disagree but multitasking doesn't have to be only user-facing apps. The notification system in Android is light-years ahead of iOS and it relies entirely on having a good multi-tasking environment. Importantly, the notifications don't have to just be from some specific set of things-that-can-notify a user as chosen by Google. Pretty much any kind of app can notify a user of anything.

In theory iOS is more than capable of supporting this on the backend, but the front end architecture is a mess and would have to be significantly reworked for even this kind of basic thing (well, it seems basic on an Android device it seems so obvious there).

My main problem with multitasking on iOS is that there isn't a good startup service implementation -- so for example if I restart my phone and don't open Google Voice at least once, I won't get push messages from it.

However, one of the reasons the platform performs well (esp. with battery life) is that the OS can kill a background process at will, and apps expect that and are usually designed to handle that gracefully. Hopefully there's more work coming to make this less of a trade off, especially as new phone versions have more resources.

The Mac had cooperative multitasking until I believe Mac OSX. They were nearly the last OS to get preemptive multitasking by a factor of like 5-6 years.

The Mac was technologically out front when it came out and then for 15 years just seemed to stand still. Architectural elements like multitasking and memory management just became dated while systems like Windows made the Mac OS look archaic. Until OS X.

I think the other commenter is alluding to iOS maybe following the same trend, but this time to Android.

Yeah, that's exactly what I was thinking about. History tends to repeat itself.

The shift from cooperative multitasking to preemptive was an extremely painful experience for Apple. How many failed OS projects did they have before they just threw in the towel and bought NeXT?

I hope that the modern equivalent doesn't go the same way for their mobile solution.

I don't think multitasking helps productivity…

I agree. And to make sure I don't forget that, I exited chrome, started a shell, started vi, added your statement to a file of quotes I keep, exited vi, exited the shell, started chrome again, logged back in to HN and posted this response.

How did you start chrome after exiting the shell?

What's funny is that your supposedly ironic comment in fact confirms what I said.

s/HN/developer.android.com/

s/vi/eclipse/

Depends on whether your task requires one app or two. One app, you are right. Two apps, ha!

Getting close. We are talking tablets there, I'd argue typical tasks on them involve only single app.

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.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000022.html

> "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?

No, I am suggesting that switching tasks (not applications) will make me 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.