iOS 9 finally brought split-screen views to the iPad, but it’s still not nearly as useful as the windowed multitasking views you get on a Mac. Developer Steve Troughton-Smith has come up with a much better solution with a new proof-of-concept called iOS window management that would bring the joy of working in a windows environment to the iPad.
Apple already has the foundation built thanks to UIKit. It only took Troughton-Smith 500 lines of code to build the concept with the UIWindow subclass, allowing individual app screens to be resized an overlaid on top of each other.
Check out the concept video:
Feature complete? iOS window manager proof of concept. Just a UIWindow subclass pic.twitter.com/fT0oFahOSM
— Steve T-S (@stroughtonsmith) December 23, 2015
Troughton-Smith’s concept looks interesting and could be useful for some users who switch between three or four simple apps while working. The concept also allows users to use side-view for one app and then smaller views of other apps at the same time.
Do you think a windowed view of apps on iPad would be beneficial? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
Buster Hein is a freelance writer who lives in Phoenix, Arizona. Twitter: @bst3r.
3 responses to “iOS concept brings joy of Windows to iPad”
Windowing like this on a small screen doesn’t make much sense to me, but on a larger screen, it does. I think that’s one thing people are looking for when they go with something like Windows tablets is being able to have multiple windows on the screen at one time. Other things are maybe pull down menus for the apps and then the other thing is file management. I know there are file managers one can download, but I haven’t seen any, so far, that are that great to use. The other thing is the quality of the application since desktop apps tend to be more full functional than mobile versions.
I’m still wondering what it would be like to have OS X on an iPad Pro. I’m wondering if down the road Apple gave the user the option of running either OS on their larger screen models as that might be interesting.
The other aspect is multi-user support but as far as I’m concerned, i have no use for multi-user support for a mobile device, they are just only used by me and no one else. EVER. But i know that some people let their kids use their iPad from time to time and I’m sure some people would like to have multi-user support for IOS.
Sorry Buster, I have to disagree that this would be useful on an iPad. Even with a 12″ screen there’s not enough space to make it productive; hell, even using the MacBook retina with OS X, requires you to use most apps in full or split screen views to make them comfortable to use.
If anything, I’m looking forward to Apple implementing more “tabs” such as in the El Capitan Mail app when composing in full screen. The fact that there’s no way to have multiple documents open in the iOS versions of Pages, Numbers, and Keynote (as well as most third party apps) limits productivity immensely.
Another fantastic addition to the iPads’ multitasking would be to allow for duplicate instances of apps, think first party implementation of “sidefari,” but I digress.
I look forward to being able to implement this in through cydia sometime in the near future; the home of all new apple beta feature testing :)