Many Tricks
Announced today, Paddock is Many Tricks’ newest product, and it’s headed for the iPad in the near future. What exactly is Paddock, you may be asking? Paddock is a program that lets you use your iPad to do many things at the same time.
Paddock does this by loading separate modules into one workspace. You can then choose to see one module at a time, or work with many at the same time. Confused? Head on over to the Paddock page to watch the preview video to get a better sense for exactly how it works. (If you’d like to see the iPad at a near-native resolution, download the 38MB 1920×1080 version instead.)
What you won’t see in the video is exactly which modules Paddock will include; the video shows only notes and a web browser. We have a nice set of modules under development that we’d like to get out with version 1.0, and a longer list planned for the future.
But we’re also interested in what modules you’d like to see in Paddock. So after watching the video, please feel free to drop your suggestions in the comments. Our 1.0 list is pretty much set, but we’re very interested in hearing what modules you would find most useful in a program like Paddock. (Note that some things, such as a movie player, aren’t possible due to what information Apple allows third parties to access.)
Sounds great, but will Apple approve it? Rumors are flying that they are rejecting, multi-app apps. Good luck. I hope it makes it!
-mpm
I’ve heard the same rumors … only time will tell. We hope they state something officially one way or the other soon though! (It’d be a shame if they were banned, as there’s nothing about our app that violates any of the known rules for store apps – it’s only one program, and it only uses published APIS.)
-rob.
Looks awesome. A necessity: A Twitter client. As basic as you want. As long as you allow people to log in, view their time lines, and tweet. New style RTs if you want. But, I see Twitter as a multitasking necessity.
Ah, it’s a stand-alone app. At first I was under the impression that it provided a layer to run other iPhone apps in it. So I could run my favorite todo app alongside of an ereader and a note app.
Guess that’s what I would like to do with it: read PDFs and other ebook formats and be able to take notes that I can sync to my computer for further processing. Some doodling app and todo app for the other types of notes would come in handy as well.
Apple wouldn’t ever allow anything like that with their API. We can’t even (apparently) get a list of installed apps to present a launcher, which was one of our original thoughts.
An iPad app that combines a browser with IRC and SSH, plus perhaps Twitter and IM, would be a huge win for iT people, who could review ticket queues in the browser, interact with customers and each other in the IRC and IM panels, and deal with back-end server work in the SSH panel. Would make iPad a must-have tool for sysadmins.
Hi
I’d like to see (and I’m afraid that Apple will not approve some of my wishes):
– A PDF viewer and a full-screen (or rather full-panel) note taker (I often have to review PDF documents and send notes to the authors)
– An embedded python interpreter
– If the python interpreter doesn’t work or would be rejected, something similar to Chalkboard&Calculator, which also provides some very basic “programming” to do some calculations