The video below has been circling in tech blogs lately and some are even praising how this should be “The Way” to do multi-tasking in iOS.
Nice (and very Mac-ish) concept but I doubt it’s usefulness.
Biggest issue with the proposed UI is the difficulty to identify apps from their exposé type thumbnails. In iOS we’ve learned to recognize apps by their icon. When we download an app from AppStore the first thing we learn is the icon. When we launch the app from iOS home screen we search for the app’s icon.
iOS apps also tend to be mainly about the content. Many apps have no or very little recognizable UI chrome. Providing random (and tiny) thumbnail screenshot does not necessarily make it easy to identify the app.
Maybe there are better ways to do multi-tasking than the current iOS implementation, but this isn’t it.