Call that Multi-tasking?

iOS4 Strip

Maybe it’s me but I just don’t get iOS4’s “multi-tasking”. Multi-tasking is supposed to be a time saver not a confusing pain in the arse.

With the introduction of iOS4 you get (limited) support for apps running in the background. Correction! You get support for certain features running in the background, such as streaming music or uploading a file. For anything else the app is put into suspended animation. These apps are put into, well what can only be described as a system tray. Double clicking the home button now brings up a display of all your running apps.

After a while that tray runs to many apps and takes many swipes to see them all (see screenshot above) which seems to somewhat defeat the purpose of this being a quick way to move between “running” apps. It gets to such a stage that I have so many apps in the tray that it is just as quick for me to find it on the normal home screens. That can’t be right surely? It seems that it is and I am not the only one to complain. The following is Jared Newman in a post entitled Multitasking With iOS 4 is Horrible: Apple Blew It:

“What bothers me the most, however, is the sloppy implementation of iPhone multitasking. Every time you open an app, it gets added to the tray, and the only way to close it is by pressing and holding any app icon, then clicking the top-left corner of the apps you want to close. If you don’t micromanage, the tray quickly becomes overrun with clutter, making it hard to find the apps you really need.”

All this and battery life that is much worse than before (and it was pretty bad to start with). Let’s hope that Apple look into both these issues quickly. However, I am not hopeful as Apple have a poor record on this sort of thing – they have, no doubt, moved onto the iPhone5.

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