As for the folders, the name complaint is nitpicking at its absolute worst, and with the 9 vs 12 thing, well, I’m pretty sure it will be quicker to open the folder and see what’s in it rather than hold the phone up to your face and squint at the tiny little icons to see what’s in the folder…

The best thing we can do for iPhone OS 4 right now is send in our feedback swiftly and oftenly, lest Apple freeze it and move forward with tying up the loose ends that are there.

So, send in your ideas for the multitasking dock and the notifications. Maybe it's not too late.

the 9v12 thing does make a bit of sense, but it's not the horrid, completely insane fiasco that they make it out to be — not to me, anyway. I also tend to simply know what's in the folders, since I don't keep many apps on my iPhone, and I was the one who made the bloody folders in the first place. ;P

no name on it, but I found it on iDesign a while back:http://idesigniphone.com/?s=03027

Good points, all. Right now it's faster for me to just go to Flickr, load it up again, and then quit it so I can find it in pole position in the multitasking dock. It would make a lot more sense if apps with *active* background processes showed on a second tier of the dock, or were given special positions. There's still hope during beta, though.

As for the extra buttons: hell yeah. I'm with you there. I wouldn't mind a bit of extra hardware support. It would certainly make games easier to play without blocking the screen.

Now I still have to see this in practice (multi-tasking is built into apps, so we're still waiting on actual 4.0 versions of our fave apps), but I think we can actually forget about task management for the most part. Most things I'd want to run in the background would simply be apps that would listen for extra signals (Skype or Beejive), or ones that are still uploading (like Flickr). I don't run internet radio myself, but even if I did, it would probably be pretty obvious that I'd left both Last.fm and Pandora on at the same time, so I'd know exactly what to close.

Most everything else about the "multi-tasking" really just seems like smart state saving, so that when your return to an app, it feels like you've never left, but it wasn't loaded in the background, anyway.

All speculation, though.

don't get me wrong: I'll still read them. I think they've got some seriously kickass articles in their archives, and when they're not cracking stupid jokes about how engineers love beer > apple, they write some great run-downs on modern tech. But it really was a very strange feeling to see one part of the site acting so childishly and then have another post coming out, wearing a suit, and pointing fingers at Apple.

How are you supposed to quit a background task. And I mean a real background task, not a suspended app. Say flickr is uploading in the background (task completion), how do I know it's still uploading and how do I stop it because I wanna upload something else or want a better Skype connection? Since the multitasking bar is only for recently used apps and task completion can take up to 10 min (in 4.0b2), the flickr app could be on page 3 or 4 by then. It gets even worse if more than one app is doing something in the background.

And the home button gets overloaded with functions. The one button mouse works on the Mac because the keyboard is also always directly accessible to issue global commands. But on the iPhone the only things that are constantly there are the home button and most of the time the status bar. But the status bar is very small and hard to tap (it's not supposed to be interacted with, in contrast to Android's status bar, which is bigger because of it). Apple needs to introduce at least one more fixed global interaction point. Even if it's in the form of touch sensitive zones left and right of the home button (if Apple insists on keeping the industrial design unchanged).

Other than that iPhone OS 5 needs two more big features to cover all the big bases: Way better notifications and support for glanceable information (widgets, enhanced lockscreen).