In which I make a Discovery

In which I make a Discovery

Everyone who cares probably knew this already, but I just discovered something cool with iOS multitasking.

If you have an iPad Air 2 or an iPad Pro, you can run two apps side by side on the screen. I was doing this so that I could listen to music via YouTube while twittering, because Apple in their wisdom mute Safari if it’s backgrounded. You have to do proper multi-tasking, not just slide-over, which is why this only works on those two models.

I was already pretty happy with my solution, devoting untold amounts of innovation and computing horsepower to wasting time more efficiently than ever before - and then I clicked on a link in Twitter, and a whole new world of possibilities opened up to me.

Now normally if you click a link in Twitter for iOS when it’s running in full-screen mode, the linked page opens in an embedded mini-browser, which is of course the Wrong Thing.

If on the other hand you click a link while Twitter is running side by side with Safari, the linked page opens directly in a new Safari tab!

Amazing, right? Right?

Okay, this is a pretty niche use case, but it makes me unreasonably happy. I hope this post is useful to someone else, too.