iPad and Multitasking
I’m seeing a few posts on the web regarding multitasking on the iPad and how the SDK doesn’t say anything about it. Apparently this is surprising to some people.
Without going into too much detail since there is an NDA on the 3.2 SDK, I would like to point out something: the iPad’s OS is called iPhone OS 3.2. It shouldn’t be any surprise that a major functionality change like multitasking wouldn’t be included in a point release of the OS. If Apple is going to introduce multitasking for the iPhone OS, wait for 4.0 at the earliest. But don’t expect to see it in a point release.
The people who are expecting major functionality to be introduced at this point of iPhone 3.0’s lifecycle are, quite honestly, not familiar with standard practices in the software industry. The iPhone OS that is running on the iPad only has the changes necessary to allow the OS to run on the new hardware with new functionality being limited to things that the Apple sees as being required by the new device. If Apple decides that multitasking is something that the platform needs, they will add it in a major revision and make it available to all devices that can run that revision.
Footnote — yes, I’m aware that MacOS X’s numbering scheme allows for major changes in the middle number. But Apple treats the major number as a constant and uses the middle number of the version to signify major releases. When looking at MacOS X version numbers, it’s best to ignore the leading 10.
