iOS Pro: The Drumbeat Begins …

iOS Pro, part one

iOS 9, in anticipation of the iPad Pro, adds split-screen multitasking. It’s clear a lot of thought went into this particular approach, and it’s naturally much cleaner than wrangling a mess of floating windows. But it has one major drawback that stems from the very core of the iOS app-centric model.

It’s actually a little absurd: In the on-stage demos, Microsoft’s Kirk Konigsbauer demonstrates the ease with which you can load up a Word document and a PowerPoint deck side-by-side. What he doesn’t show is that the moment you want to load a second Word document into that other pane, something possible since Microsoft’s Multiple Document Interface in the late 1980s, iOS will stop you: There’s simply no way to do it, because the app-centric paradigm of iOS has no room for document-level UI separation.

He goes on to illustrate a Sildeover side panel file picker.

Something the marvelous Blogsy app for iOS has had for quite some time.

Ahem.

Get out more. I don’t own an iPad and even I knew that.