Pioneering the iPad App Marketplace
Originally released in June 2010 after completing development in the Spring, Multitaskers was one of the first apps released on the App Store for iPad and remains one of the few of its kind today. The app restores several critical features found on the iPhone that did not appear natively on iPad at its launch, such as a calculator, weather, to-do list, timer, stopwatch and more.
In total, Multitaskers includes eight “Taskers”, each of which fill an important role on the device but aren’t particularly worthy of an app to call their own. I designed the user interface for Multitaskers, including its icon and all of the visual elements seen in the app with the exception of the weather illustrations done by MegatonApps co-founder Sean O’Neill and several of the wallpaper options, which were submitted by friends.
At launch, the app was featured as “New and Noteworthy” by Apple in more than a dozen countries worldwide, and the app quickly shot to the top rankings for productivity apps worldwide.
Though the app has fallen into obsolescence as the iPad has evolved, I’m very proud of the work we did on Multitaskers, as we largely finished design and development of the app prior to the iPad’s initial launch. We did so by creating scale models of the hardware months before we got our hands on production units and by drawing out each interface element by hand in order to confirm its usability in the final app.