If you guys don’t mind a running commentary… here’s my first annoyance.
You can have multiple apps open in a workspace (up to four), say Safari and couple of news apps. But: if you tap the three dots at the top for any of those apps and choose Full screen to focus on that app, there’s no similar menu item to return to the previous view. So there is a “maximize” (full screen) button, but no “unmaximize” button. The solution: drag one of the Cheeto icons in the lower corners to make the window smaller. It works, but it’s a little disorienting at first, and a bit more work than a simple unmaximize option.
To continue in that vein, I can’t believe I’m sitting here with my 2021 iPad Pro wishing for freaking Windows 11 touch gestures!! How the mighty have fallen.
In Windows 11 you can grab the title bar of a non-maximized window and drag it against the top of the screen to maximize it. In an iPadOS workspace you can’t. It wouldn’t break anything it seems to include that, but instead we need to tap-tap (once for menu, once for selecting fullscreen).
In Windows 11 you can grab the title bar of a fullscreen app and drag down to make it windowed again, at the previous size. In iPadOS there is no such option, you need to manually drag the window corners to get to a size you like. If you drag the three-dot window handle of a fullscreen app down in iPadOS, it initially looks promising: the window moves down, and it seems like you have left fullscreen view. But once you let go, it floats back up to stay in fullscreen view. Gee, thanks!
Another observation, in the task switcher (cmd-tab) there’s zero indication of which apps belong together in a workspace. No outline around a group of apps, no shaded box, nothing. Everything looks like independent apps, until you tap one, and three or four apps in that workspace all show up. Surprise! You better have some good window management in your brain, because iPadOS isn’t helping.
Thinking about all this some more, I really think that the artificial “multitask in groups of four” is going to be a failure. It’s just too finicky and confusing. When a user adds a fifth app to a workspace, the oldest app (I think) quietly gets kicked out into its own workspace. So unless you mentally keep counting to four, you’re going to be annoyed to find an app gone from your workspace.
Instead of this mess, give us multiple desktops and allow us to drop as many apps as we like onto each desktop. Sure you’ll have to cache/background some of them, but at least I’d understand what was happening.
I’ll keep playing with it, but for now the whole concept seems pretty confusing.