The first version of the iPad doesn’t support app multi-tasking but a Portugese firm called ElasticFiction has won Apple’s approval to sell a split screen browser that will allow users to listen to music and watch videos while browsing other web pages by placing two browser screens side by side each other at the same time.
Called SplitBrowser (iTunes link), the app will play MP3 files and HTML5 videos and sells for $1.99. Check out the screencast below and imagine what you could do with two browser windows open at once on the iPad.
It’s little innovations like this that will deliver experiences that are hard to forecast before the launch of this big new touchscreen interface.
As Doc Searls wrote this morning:
The iPad will arrive in the market with an advantage no other completely new computing device for the mass market has ever enjoyed: the ability to run a 100,000-app portfolio that’s already developed, in this case for the iPhone. Unless the iPad is an outright lemon, this alone should assure its success.
Take that same developer platform and give it a new interface like the iPad’s, though, and you’ll see apps get developed that wouldn’t have made sense on the iPhone. Like a split screen browser.
