Windowed Apps Come To iPad…Finally!

With the largest App library of any tablet computing platform on the market today, I haven’t found a reason to jailbreak my iPad…until today. Jailbreaking or hacking an iPhone, iPod or iPad to allow the installation of apps that have not been approved by Apple’s App Store curators, is a popular, though risky, endeavor. With all of the approved apps, I personally have never felt the need to leave Steve Job’s walled garden.

However, with the introduction of Quasar, a $9.99 app available on the alt-app store Cydia, iPad users can finally run multiple apps onscreen at the same time. One of my main gripes with an otherwise wonderful tablet was that I was unable to truly multitask. Many is the time that I wanted to transcribe material from one app to another, looking at my notes on one side of the screen and typing a document on the other.

The advantages to this new app are obvious and the implementation of the multitasking and windows management seems to have been well thought out. There is no word yet on if this app will slow down iPads or even if it will run at all on the first-gen iPad, but all I have to say is that using several small iPhone apps next to each other onscreen seems like the ideal use case. It has always bothered me that when I use an iPhone app on my tablet I have to deal with either pixel doubling or a giant black bezel around my scaled down app. Now I can dispense with that.

The ability to truly multitask on a tablet is the killer app that makes me willing to expose myself to the dangers of malware from unapproved apps.

I only hope that I don’t accidentally brick my iPad when I jailbreak it.

…and it looks like it would work great with this OSX theme.