Quote:
Originally Posted by Harmon
Actually, what you are talking about is not multitasking. Human beings really can't multitask, at least at the conscious level. What human beings do is focus & refocus their attention, foregrounding and backgrounding various activities. The process can be so fast that it seems like one is doing multiple things at once, but it just ain't so. It's an illusion.
Devices, OTOH, can multitask (as can human beings, at the non-conscious level.) So the objection that the iPad can't multitask (with the exceptions listed above in an earlier post) is valid at the device level.
But your concern is not with multitasking, in my opinion. It is with how quickly the device allows you to foreground & background between apps. That is, you are concerned about how quickly you can do sequential activities - which I hereby dub "sequitasking."
One can quite easily move between word processing, Wikipedia, and searching the internet on the iPad right now. It just takes a few seconds longer that we have become used to on laptops, because apps don't stay open (for the most part) when a different app is opened.
When I first got my iPad, eons ago it seems now, I spent a little time with it, learning to do the typing. I got up to an okay speed - nothing like on a physical keyboard, but doable. Then I went into an Apple store & one of the sales kids (they are all kids from my perspective) started typing on the iPad at about a hundred words a minute. And I'm not kidding. I know what a hundred words a minute looks like because I've had a couple of secretaries who could do it.
Point being that I'll bet that although it seems that the time lag you experience in sequitasking is excruciatingly slow, most of the real lag is in you - that is, in how much of what you are doing has been subcontracted to a non-conscious process like typing, and how fast you can carry out that process.
When the iPad becomes capable of running two or three programs at once, it will involve, I think, some kind of gesture to switch between apps. In principle, that is no different than opening & closing apps, unless the apps are continuing to do something while we are in some other app. It will be a little faster than the current procedure, but it will seem much faster because of the sense we will have that we are "multitasking." But "multitasking" will still be an illusion.
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That's precisely what I'd like to do. Having to close a word processing app, open a browser app, surf the web, close that app, re-open open the word-processing app, then re-open my document and locate the place where I left off seems a tad cumbersome; but in all fairness, I speak as someone who has no actual experience with the iPad outside of a few minutes playing around with one in an Apple store. How's it working for you? I'm only speaking from what I
imagine the experience to be like.
In truth; for what it is, it seems quite a remarkable device. I was extremely impressed with the rapid touch response of the virtual keyboard. It blows my e-ink keyboards, both physical (Kindle) and virtual (Sony PRS-600 and Nook) out of the water.