Metamorphium

Mac OS has an extremely useful feature called Dashboard. It is simply a collection of “widgets” (basic HTML and Javascript code) that run in the background and can be brought to the front at any time. It has long been rumored that the iPad will feature a similar Dashboard, since many of the iPhone’s basic apps, like Calculator and Weather, are missing from the iPad. Of course, a simple Dashboard port to the iPad makes a lot of sense since it makes the iPad a more viable alternative to netbooks.

However, the iPad Dashboard can offer much more than just a simple collection of widgets. For one, widgets that constantly run in the background is another potential solution to the multitasking problem, since it would allow small programs like Pandora to keep playing even after the user leaves Dashboard. But even beyond that, the Dashboard is an excellent way for Apple to really integrate iPads and Macs in order to spur sales of both devices. Imagine being able to seamlessly and transparently sync your widgets between your iPad and your Mac (either wirelessly via MobileMe, which already syncs your Dashboard widgets, or tethered via iTunes). Regardless of whether you’re at your desk or on the road, your dashboard will always look the same and provide familiar functionality.

Apple should create a Widget section in the iTunes App store, where users will be able to download widgets for the Mac and sync them to their iPads. They will then be able to easily sync data for those widgets between the two devices. This is only a small fraction of the features that will be possible from a sync-able Dashboard on the iPad.

Multitasking, quite possibly the most requested feature on the iPhone, will probably still be limited in some way, even when it is announced. In order to strike a balance between the power of multitasking and the drain on performance and battery life, Apple will probably limit the number of simultaneous apps to 4. However, Apple will only implement task management if it is simple enough for a child to manage. This means there will be no real process manager. Instead, there will need to be an intuitive GUI for users to manage multiple apps.

Luckily, Apple already has an easy-to-use interface for managing multiple simultaneous applications on the Mac. It’s called Spaces. Spaces was designed to make managing multiple applications as intuitive as possible by creating the illusion of having multiple Mac desktops on which these applications are running. A similar paradigm would work excellently on the iPhone, where the user could have four Spaces, or home screens, each running a separate application. It’d be like having 4 iPhones in your pocket.

I have created a quick video to demonstrate how this might work…