Check Out iPadOS 15's New Multitasking Features

[TheDailyApple]

Took a lot of courage releasing iOS 14 again.

People when Apple stuffs a bunch of new features into an update:

“Why can’t Apple move to a biyearly update schedule or focus only on stability and speed every other year? This release is so buggy. I miss snow leopard!”

People when Apple doesn’t introduce many new features (which generally results in a more stable release):

“Apple can’t innovate anymore, they’re letting their platform stagnate. I’m switching to Android/Windows.”

 

[iamyash]

really liking this, just as I visioned. But not liking the Shelf feature, prefer the old UI.

 

[jdawgnoonan]

People when Apple stuffs a bunch of new features into an update:

“Why can’t Apple move to a biyearly update schedule or focus only on stability and speed every other year? This release is so buggy. I miss snow leopard!”

People when Apple doesn’t introduce many new features (which generally results in a more stable release):

“Apple can’t innovate anymore, they’re letting their platform stagnate. I’m switching to Android/Windows.”

I get what you are saying, but other than the new multi-tasking items in this video, everything in iPadOS that is new was in iOS last year. The new multi-tasking items surely are an improvement as I personally really dislike multi-tasking on the iPad currently. I personally find it disappointing that iPadOS is not more differentiated from iOS with this release, not that I expect it to be MacOS. I certainly do not see anything new in iPad OS that justifies the same M1 processor in an iPad that a Mac has, which is disappointing as well.

 

[Razorpit]

Took a lot of courage releasing iOS 14 again.

Well at least the betas should be solid. 😉

 

[rdinterman]

This is SO much better! Been using it since Monday. Works like a charm!

 

[neutrino23]

Looks interesting. I’m not too worried that I can only see two apps at once. Even if I have lots of apps open I only use one at a time. e.g. When building a Keynote I’ll switch to GraphicConverter to prepare a graphic then put that into the keynote document. Lots of switching back and forth. If drag and drop works well this could be a big improvement.

 

[midkay]

I appreciate these improvements, but I can’t help but wish they had gone straight to windowing. They could totally do it in an intuitive, cohesive way and I think it would feel a lot simpler to everyone than the cognitive burden of determining how all these buttons and modes and ‘shelf’ and everything behave.

Imagine if, instead of going ‘home’ to your app icons, swiping up on the home bar simply shrunk the active app down to a ‘windowed’ view, and now it’s sitting among two or three other windows on your ‘desktop’, which are of course arranged in whatever order and spatial placement you like, helpful for efficiency and muscle memory. (Max of 3-4 windows open at once probably, to avoid clutter etc.) Then of course each of the visible app windows has a button to go full screen, can be resized using a visual cue on certain corners, and can be dragged to left/right sides to fill that half of the screen (split view). Suddenly everything is just spatial and intuitive.
This desktop view could be the new leftmost page of your homescreen (with more desktops able to be added), and to the right are your home screen pages of app icons. The dock is always visible.
A simple CC toggle turns windowing off completely for anyone who doesn’t want it. Back to exclusively fullscreen apps.
Why not? Have I missed anything?

 

[Moonlight]

When can we jailbreak this and dual boot MacOS? Never? oh ok...

 

[AppleTO]

Well, I guess it’s yet another year of multitasking disabled on my iPad.

Personally, this is not my kind of multitasking.

 

[citysnaps]

Heh...and *some* people really want macOS running on the iPad! A real knee-slapper.

 

[TheDailyApple]

I get what you are saying, but other than the new multi-tasking items in this video, everything in iPadOS that is new was in iOS last year.

Most of the new features iPad received were announced during the iOS and macOS segments. When Apple introduces new features that come to all three systems they spread them out across the keynote. (for instance Apple could have introduced new safari during the iOS segment and universal control during the iPadOS one, but then they wouldn't have had anything to announce for macOS)

I think they should announce new features that multiple systems will get (like new safari and FaceTime) separately first, and then announce only the stuff specific to each OS (like iPad multitasking) during their segments.

I certainly do not see anything new in iPad OS that justifies the same M1 processor in an iPad that a Mac has, which is disappointing as well.

I don't view the M1 as all that major for iPad Pro. It's essentially an A14X, which is what would have been expected in this year's iPad Pro anyway. It likely would have been more expensive for Apple to develop a separate chip in between the A14 and M1 than it was to just put the M1 in iPad Pro and call it a day.

Bottom line being that the iPad Pro's hardware was already capable of far more than it's software allowed, and that hasn't changed.

 

[AlexESP]

The best part of this new multitasking is how you can quickly swipe from the top dots to the bottom… but you only test the click and overlay option (which I think is completely secondary). The mouse syndrome: forgetting that the iPad is a touch-first device.

 

[Manatee]

Better, but I really want windows that can be sized and arranged on the screen. The iPad Pro has a pretty big hi-res screen, lots of memory, and a very powerful processor. No reason it shouldn’t be capable of the most flexible windowing.

I wonder how many more years it’ll take to catch up to the windowing and multitasking I had on my Toshiba T4400 with its 9.5” SVGA screen that I used almost thirty years ago.

 

[thimplicity]

better than before, but still an awful implementation. there's a better way of doing multitasking that's more productive.

How would you do it? I read a lot of “there are better ways to do this”, but rarely does someone line out how this better world would look like.

 

[Victor Mortimer]

Better, but I really want windows that can be sized and arranged on the screen. The iPad Pro has a pretty big hi-res screen, lots of memory, and a very powerful processor. No reason it shouldn’t be capable of the most flexible windowing.

I wonder how many more years it’ll take to catch up to the windowing and multitasking I had on my Toshiba T4400 with its 9.5” SVGA screen that I used almost thirty years ago.

Might as well just put macOS on it.

And I mean that as a good thing, iPadOS is a very much inferior OS, Apple should just admit that it was a mistake and put macOS on the iPad. There's zero reason not to now that they're using the same chips. A few tweaks to make touch work better in macOS, an admission that nobody is doing real work on an iPad without a keyboard attached anyway, and they're done.

 

[farewelwilliams]

How would you do it? I read a lot of “there are better ways to do this”, but rarely does someone line out how this better world would look like.

i'm writing up a post about it, complete with mockups.

 

[Victor Mortimer]

How would you do it? I read a lot of “there are better ways to do this”, but rarely does someone line out how this better world would look like.

Dragable resizeable app windows. You know, like on the Macintosh.

And before the "screen too small" crowd chimes in, remember that the Macintosh screen had dragable resizeable windows in 1984 on a 9" screen. Only the iPad Mini has a smaller screen than that, and not by much.

 

[Victor Mortimer]

i'm writing up a post about it, complete with mockups.

No need, Apple did it for you.

 

[pdaholic]

It’s just an easier way to place an app in a window, rather than constantly having to drag and drop from the dock. I’m okay with that. I don’t see how working with more than 2 windows at a time would be comfortable on the 11 (might work on the 12.9).
As always, awesome work Dan!

 

[skoor101]

Yea, that is an improvement but mostly an aesthetic issue. How I select the multitasked apps has always been a minor problem compared to what the multitasked apps can do. My issue is that iPadOS does not really allow multitasking in the sense that background processes can run to completion as needed. The visual aspects of it are sort of irrelevant.

Here are examples of multitasking issues that I am talking about:
- I have an app that can mass-edit the EXIF data on photos. It can do a few dozen in the blink of eye, but doing it to 1,000 or 10,000 photos all at once can take a long time - especially if the photos are on a network drive. But the OS doesn't let the app run in the background for very long. So if I want the app to run for 30 minutes straight, which is how long it might take for it to do what it does, I have to keep it in the foreground and the iPad awake.
- Similar to above, uploading a large amount of data to an FTP is a problem. The FTP app cannot run in the background for very long due to OS limitations, so eventually the OS sleeps the app and the transfer is stalled. I can't start the FTP transfer, send it to background, and mess around on Facebook while the FTP app does it's thing off-screen.

Your on target with your observations. The problem is IpadOS in the not how you invoke multi-tasking, but essentially IpadOS does not swap (or page in mainframe terms)- it does not have a robust memory system. Its heritage being an Iphone, did not need it. And until recently no one expected much from an Ipad just like not much on an Iphone. Apps essentially have to be in memory. Hence the reason for the limted number of active multi-tasking apps and the 5gb app limitation.

Just image any modern OS- take out its memory swapping/paging management and you would have to either have a very large memory, keep the size of apps small or limited the amount of multi-tasking. Or all the above- the limitation of IpadOS today.

And to run a very large app like Final Cut (and even more so for several large multi-tasking apps) you would have to have a very large amount off memory (and probably a large amount of local storage to make it convenient or file mgt limitations). Oh, kinda like a M1 Ipad with 16GB ram/1 or 2TB of storage. And did you notice the odd coupling of 16GB ram with the storage configurations? Me thinks there is a reason.

 

[bradman83]

Dragable resizeable app windows. You know, like on the Macintosh.

And before the "screen too small" crowd chimes in, remember that the Macintosh screen had dragable resizeable windows in 1984 on a 9" screen. Only the iPad Mini has a smaller screen than that, and not by much.

The issue isn’t that the screen is too small, the issue is that windowed UIs tend to be too clunky to use in a touch interface. Windows 10 is a great example of these shortcomings. Touch interfaces work fine in full screen mode on W10 but in windowed mode it feels clumsy to use with touch. Apple is always going to keep the iPad’s interface as touch-first.

 

[farewelwilliams]

No need, Apple did it for you.

View attachment 1790405

We all know how well that turned out https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/143869-the-5-biggest-tech-failures-of-2012/2

 

[bradman83]

Yea, that is an improvement but mostly an aesthetic issue. How I select the multitasked apps has always been a minor problem compared to what the multitasked apps can do. My issue is that iPadOS does not really allow multitasking in the sense that background processes can run to completion as needed. The visual aspects of it are sort of irrelevant.

Here are examples of multitasking issues that I am talking about:
- I have an app that can mass-edit the EXIF data on photos. It can do a few dozen in the blink of eye, but doing it to 1,000 or 10,000 photos all at once can take a long time - especially if the photos are on a network drive. But the OS doesn't let the app run in the background for very long. So if I want the app to run for 30 minutes straight, which is how long it might take for it to do what it does, I have to keep it in the foreground and the iPad awake.
- Similar to above, uploading a large amount of data to an FTP is a problem. The FTP app cannot run in the background for very long due to OS limitations, so eventually the OS sleeps the app and the transfer is stalled. I can't start the FTP transfer, send it to background, and mess around on Facebook while the FTP app does it's thing off-screen.

This is more a limitation of iOS‘s memory management model (ie: no virtual memory) and the fact that iPads up until the M1 pros were really only equipped with enough RAM to run 1-2 apps at a time in the foreground (and barely that). Theoretically an iPad with more RAM can (and usually does) allow background applications to run longer before they’re killed by the OS to allocate the RAM to other apps. I don’t know this can be solved with software - lower end iPads have too little RAM and not enough internal storage to use as a useful page file for true multitasking, and I don’t envision Apple offering completely different memory management schemes for different iPad models.

 

[citysnaps]

The issue isn’t that the screen is too small, the issue is that windowed UIs tend to be too clunky to use in a touch interface. Windows 10 is a great example of these shortcomings. Touch interfaces work fine in full screen mode on W10 but in windowed mode it feels clumsy to use with touch. Apple is always going to keep the iPad’s interface as touch-first.

Bingo! That's one of the major reasons why we'll not see macOS on an iPad. People here who think that would be great haven't thought this through in how that would be cumbersome in daily use. It would be a nice conversation piece to see macOS running on an iPad. But actually using it to do real work would quickly get old.

This also dovetails why in another post I today laid out why I'd never want to post-process my image files in Lightroom Classic on an iPad. For playing around, maybe. For serious work, no.

 

[genovelle]

Yea, that is an improvement but mostly an aesthetic issue. How I select the multitasked apps has always been a minor problem compared to what the multitasked apps can do. My issue is that iPadOS does not really allow multitasking in the sense that background processes can run to completion as needed. The visual aspects of it are sort of irrelevant.

Here are examples of multitasking issues that I am talking about:
- I have an app that can mass-edit the EXIF data on photos. It can do a few dozen in the blink of eye, but doing it to 1,000 or 10,000 photos all at once can take a long time - especially if the photos are on a network drive. But the OS doesn't let the app run in the background for very long. So if I want the app to run for 30 minutes straight, which is how long it might take for it to do what it does, I have to keep it in the foreground and the iPad awake.
- Similar to above, uploading a large amount of data to an FTP is a problem. The FTP app cannot run in the background for very long due to OS limitations, so eventually the OS sleeps the app and the transfer is stalled. I can't start the FTP transfer, send it to background, and mess around on Facebook while the FTP app does it's thing off-screen.

That sounds like a very Processor intensive, battery draining operation. I think the purpose for the iPad is to get work done on the go, but not replace a desktop processing farm. I don’t believe those hardcore processes are the intended use for the iPad.