Currently, multitasking on the iPhone is a bit of a shamble, and many productivity killers will still remain even as iPhone OS 4 rolls out onto devices. The biggest problem is making apps work with each other; developers often integrate services like Text Expander or Instapaper, but you may not necessarily have those apps on your phone. Chris Clark calls them ‘convenience features,’ and he suggests that the iPhone OS should adopt services to absolve this problem.
Clark elaborates,
“If you’re a serious Mac nerd you already know where this article is headed…A Services Menu for iPhone. […] A Service takes the current selection and sends it to another application to be worked on, which may or may not pass the result back to the original caller. Services are under-utilized on the Mac because we’re so accustomed to copy and paste, drag and drop, and the routine of saving a file to the desktop with one application so you can open it with another. But iPhone OS, lacking two out of three of these options, could foster a Services explosion.
On the Mac, Services are a niche. On iPhone OS they’d be nothing short of a revolution.”
I completely agree. Content manipulation on the iPhone has always been a problem. Users will often utilize a variety of applications, not just one, to manage, edit, and serve content. Services are incredibly powerful, and would sort of reinvent how we interact with multiple applications. Forget quick switching or multi-tasking: services would provide true, inline integration with everything currently installed on your iPhone. Steve Jobs, are you listening? Get your engineers on this stat!
