Let's take a look at the new multitasking functionality in iOS 11 on the iPad.
Now the iPad had some great multitasking for iOS 10 as well but things are a little different
now.
So, we have this Dock now at the bottom of the screen.
The Dock works like it did before where it's persistent across different Home screens.
You can drag items down to it and add it to it and drag things up.
It's important, this time, that you put the apps that you use most, especially ones that
you're going to use for multitasking the most, in the Dock because this is how you start
multitasking.
As an example let's go into Safari and I'm just browsing a webpage.
Say I want to check Mail at the same time.
I'm going to tap below the bottom of the screen and drag up and you see the Dock appears.
If I keep going I get the full screen with Control Center and all my recent apps and
everything like that.
I don't want to go all the way up.
I just want to go just far enough up so the Dock appears at the bottom.
I can switch to another app by tapping on it or I can tap and drag another app onto
the screen.
I'm going to do that with Mail.
Tap and drag onto the screen.
I can add to the left side or the right side in two different modes.
One is to just release like this when it's kind of this floating window and I get floating
window for that app.
Notice that Safari is still full screen behind this.
I can grab that handle at the very top, there's a little handle at the top of that window,
and drag to the left side, the right side.
I can drag off the right side, only the right side, and it dismisses it but yet I can tap
off the right side and drag back on and it comes right back on.
It's a really quick and easy way to get something out of the way.
So I can be reading something here in Safari and I can maybe get it out of the way to read
something here and get it out of the way to read something there or take it off the screen
completely and then bring it back.
I can also, if I wanted to, make this a full one-third of the screen.
So I'm going to tap the handle at the top and drag it down a little bit.
Now it makes it a full third of the screen.
Now I can drag that middle portion there to move it across, to split screen like that,
or to completely get rid of it.
I could start in that mode as well.
By dragging up to get the Dock.
Dragging Mail.
If I go too far to the right it will go into that mode there where I've got now both apps
having their own portion of the screen.
Notice that in all these different modes both apps are completely functional.
I could scroll through both of them and do what I need in both of them.
So it's, unlike before where sometimes you would have one app that was kind of frozen
behind there and you would just see.
So it's really very useful to be able to do this.
Not only that but when you're in this mode, not the floating window mode but where each
app has a portion of the screen, if I were to go back to the Home screen and go back
to one of those two apps, like say Safari, it gives me back that screen with both of
them.
As a matter of fact if I were to drag up from the bottom and go all the way to see my recent
apps, you can see Safari and Mail are grouped together there and I can, you know, tap to
go back to that screen that both of them are on.
Kind of like Mission Control, a little bit, on the Mac.
It's also very easy to swap apps here.
So if I wanted the Music app instead of Mail to be there I can tap and drag and bring up
the Music app and have it replace that.
So a lot of good functionality in iOS 11.
You've got to practice with it and get used to it but definitely it works great here on
the standard screen iPad Pro which is what I'm using, the old 9.7 inch.
One thing to keep in mind, is of course the apps need to have been developed to work with
these various modes.
So, for instance, there will be some apps that you know that are not Apple apps that
are not going to work very well.
So let's run the Kindle app, for instance, and with Kindle I can still bring up another
app.
So let's say bring up the Music app here and have that as a window but I can't make that
into a full one-third of the screen because the Kindle app doesn't have a mode where it
can only display in two-thirds.
So this gives me the ability to use multitasking with apps that don't even have an enabled
as long as they are the big app in the background.