9-bits by David Kaneda

A tumblog by David Kaneda, creative director at Sencha.


POWERED by FUSION

September 29th 2011

“Stop. Pull everything together into a single stack, take a breath, and enjoy the work.”
Unitasking, Trent Walton
multitasking inspiration lion mac

iPhone 4.0 Multitasking »

Apple has announced multitasking in the next version of the iPhone OS. To maintain performance, Apple is limiting background processes to seven available APIs.

Background audio This will be fantastic for apps like Pandora. They even have access to the lock screen’s music player controls.

Voice over IP This is almost difficult to believe, but iPhone 4 gives VoIP apps like Skype full background access. Users can stay online (even if the phone is sleeping), see when people are calling, and answer.

Background location Users can grant apps access to their location for social services like Loopt, or navigation apps like Maps.

Task Notification Developers can continue to run processes while their apps are in the background, and send a notification when it’s completed. The demo showed a Flickr photo upload, that gave an alert when it was done.

Push Notifications Seen it.

Local Notifications Like push notifications, but local.

Fast App Switching What seems to be the base of app switching — the ability for developers to “save state” when the user switches apps.

apple iphone multitasking
multitasking design ui ux
As a concept, multitasking goes beyond just background processes. There’s an aspect of multitasking which is purely visual. For example, when developing a website, I’ll often put the Photoshop file next to my browser, for comparison. In a roundabout way, this means the iPad already has multitasking. Consider apps like Mail where, on the iPad, the list view and detail view have been combined to one screen. Users can not only read an email, but also instantly see when the previous email in that thread was sent, who sent it, and delete it—all without losing their place. To me, this is a form of multitasking. Extending this split screen idea to the app level presents a difficult UX challenge, but could be a better approach for multitasking than the typical “windowed” metaphor used on desktops.

As a concept, multitasking goes beyond just background processes. There’s an aspect of multitasking which is purely visual. For example, when developing a website, I’ll often put the Photoshop file next to my browser, for comparison.

In a roundabout way, this means the iPad already has multitasking. Consider apps like Mail where, on the iPad, the list view and detail view have been combined to one screen. Users can not only read an email, but also instantly see when the previous email in that thread was sent, who sent it, and delete it—all without losing their place. To me, this is a form of multitasking. Extending this split screen idea to the app level presents a difficult UX challenge, but could be a better approach for multitasking than the typical “windowed” metaphor used on desktops.

multitasking ipad apple iphone ui ux

Multitasking is a Concept »

There has been a lot of discussion over the past few weeks on whether or not the iPad (and iPhone for that matter) should support multitasking. Many people seem to have a different interpretation of what this means, whether it’s just listening to Pandora while browsing the web, having a faster way to switch apps running in the background (akin to WebOS’s concept of “cards”), or just having an app be able to fetch data in the background.

I’ll be posting some more thoughts on multitasking throughout the day, but first a quick poll: Do you want multitasking? Why or why not?

ipad iphone multitasking ui ux
“Each new ‘thing’ you discover is like a reward for your brain – well done!, it says, you checked for a thing, and you found one!. And so you check again. And again, and again.”
James Frost, Singletasking
inspiration multitasking

Also noted: