Masochist me? An Ars writer's iPad-only workday

How easy is it to complete a full workday while only using the iPad? One intrepid Ars editors learns that—surprise!—it's actually doable.

<a href='http://meincmagazine.com/apple/news/2011/09/doable-or-not-my-experience-with-working-for-ars-on-the-ipad.ars'>Read the whole story</a>

 

[krimhorn]

The command-tab thing would be a frustratingly easy thing for Apple to fix too -- it's one of those elegant changes that would have zero effect for people without a keyboard but make life a billion times easier for people with one.

They can't. iOS doesn't work that way. There is no real multi-tasking i.e. apps aren't sitting open in memory. Pressing the Home key saves the current app's state to disk, then closes it. So when you press Command+Tab, there's nothing to Command+Tab to.

It's more about the interaction metaphor than the actual nuts and bolts of the process. When you launch an application it gets entered into the Application Drawer. Even when you return to the Home Screen that app stays in the Application Drawer until you long press on its icon and select the 'x' to remove it. At least for my iPod Touch it even stores the app drawer state over reboots.

So Cmd+Tab would work if they used it to open the app drawer and select through the recent apps run.

Note: I'm a Windows user with limited Mac experience so I'm approaching this from the Alt+Tab functionality of Windows. If the Cmd+Tab functionality of MacOS is sufficiently different from that then the previous poster's statement stands.