One of the biggest complaints about the iPad is that it can’t (assuming it’s just like the iPhone OS) multitask (beyond playng music and doing something else). Well, it sure wasn’t mentioned but until it actually ships we have no idea how EXACTLY it will operate beyond a few good guesses (or at least until someone outside of Apple can spend a few days with it). So, how could you manipulate a single document or image using multiple programs WITHOUT having all these programs open at the same time?
Here’s my idea of how it could work. Say you’re using the eventual iMovie app on an iPad and you want to drop a photo of your dog Bucky onscreen for however long but don’t like the color balance or you want to crop it or whatever. So (with new multi-touch actions) you hold one finger down on the image and double tap it. A pop-up window appears with all the various (eventual) photo image editing apps you have (Identified as such by developers). Pick one from the list. iMovie drops off screen (saving your current edit point with a temporary name if you didn’t save it ahead of time) and closes freeing up almost all the resources it was using.
It then opens the image editor (Called iImageEd or somesuch) you selected and you do whatever it is you want to do. Done with that, you now want to add some simple animations so again you hold down one finger and double tap for other related applications and select iAnimate (yes I’m making these up as I go along) and animate Bucky’s paw waving back and forth.
Once completed, another multi-touch action (I don’t know, swipe one finger across while doing the hokey pokey) shows the application path the image (or document) has taken since leaving iMovie. Select which program you want to use next and go. If you go all the way back to the original program the path deletes itself for whatever next action or file you want to work with.
Where it can get tricky is how do you access the original file and each revision in each program you changed it with? How about this? For images, you already have a kind of iPhoto lite built-in with categories like Faces and Places as well as time-based (as in when you added them or other meta-data from the image itself). Add another category…Applications.
Selecting Applications adds a list on the left side with each image-related app you own. Select the application and any image you changed with that app appears (which can also be time, name, or date stamped). Files can be saved locally short-term or uploaded to DropBox or MobileMe or whatever cloud-based service you prefer.
A Documents (for text applications) link could work the same way. This ends up kind of being an OS X Finder-like experience (but without the need for multiple windows). At no time do you have more than one app open so you don’t waste battery life and memory (beyond the “Path remembered”). It’s all Flash memory so switching between applications would be reasonably fast.
As new catagories emerge, new links could be added. Meta-data added to the file (relatively small as compared to the file itself) keeps track of where each type of file could be seen.
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