Dear Leader announced the next version of the iPhone operating system last week. Amongst its more notable features was the inclusion of multitasking, or at least a crippled version of it. Above is El Jobso with a screenshot of what it looks like.

According to Engadget, “It’s not a ‘true’ multitasking system…You just double click the home button and see a list of your apps, and you can just tap to switch between apps.”

Hmmm… this is all sounding (and looking) very familiar…

A couple of months ago I mocked up the above screenshot and described how Apple could fake multitasking:

“What if Apple enabled a three finger downward swipe which would pull up a dock of your four (or in the case of the iPad, six) most recently used apps. Those apps aren’t open – they’re just the ones you used most recently.”

Eerily close to the way they’re really implementing multitasking? Yes.

Was Apple working on this months before I posted it? Maybe.

Do I really think Steve Jobs reads my blog? Absolutely I do.

Hi Steve.

Top image courtesy of Engadget, obviously.

There you have it. The first ever picture of The Other Drummer on an iPad. Now don’t you feel special?

I got to play with one for about a half hour on Tuesday. I must say, it’s a sexy piece of hardware. Downside: it’s quite heavy, to the point where it’s uncomfortable to hold with one hand.

The weight also made it hard to prop up on my crossed leg – it kept sliding down requring that I keep one hand on it. Kind of annoying.

But it’s fast. Oh, my is it fast.

Like greased, hyperactive torpedo fast.

And it’s incredibly smooth. Makes my iPhone 3GS look like a Commodore 64.

Yes. The screen is beautiful.

Yes, apps built for the iPad are on a completely different level than iPhone apps.

Yes, the keyboard is quite doable.

Is this going to change the face of computing? For some people, yes. Will it change the way we consume media? Almost certainly.

Of course, those are just my impressions after a half hour with it.

What about you? Have you had any hands-on time? If not, ask any questions you may have in the comments.

Word, y’all. Sorry about that. Thought the RSS feed was up, but it wasn’t, but now it is. So problem solved.

It’s been a rough week. I’ll write about most of it in more detail later, but in the meantime there are more pressing matters to deal with. Specifically, my wife’s grandma is in the hospital with serious health problems related to the open heart surgery she had earlier this week. She’s not out of the clear yet so I humbly ask for your prayers and faith in her behalf.

Thanks and see you on the flip side.

Image courtesy of here.

For those of you who are interested (and I can’t imagine anyone wouldn’t be) here’s the list of things left to do before the transition is complete:

• Propagate, dang it! Propagate!
• Change Feedburner settings
• Install Google Analytics
• Install SiteMeter
• Tweak the sidebar goodies
• Show comment count on homepage It only indicates there are comments on posts originally written on WordPress – not the imported ones. So everyone is going to have to click on “No comments” under each post to see if there are, in fact, comments there or not.
• Design tweaks (e.g. rollover states)
• Figure out why when I hit “save” nothing changes on the site Buggy plugin. Disabled it and things are running smoothly.
• Figure out what happened to the second half of 2008 and much of 2009. Looks like it didn’t catch the flight.

If you find anything broken/wrong, please leave me a comment here and I’ll respond.

Thanks.

Sadly, I can’t access the new URL from my house yet (I’m posting this from my phone) so I’m sitting around waiting for he propogation to finish so I can wrap up importing and start customizing it a bit.

So congratulations on getting here first. You’re awesome.