Complete Neglect of iOS 9 Multitasking Support

My ideal use case for using Kindle — indeed, truly the only use case for Kindle in college that TRULY makes sense — involves following along through the in-class socratic discussions while also keeping as organized and thorough notes as possible. Not even limited to in-class activity, I often times would love to pull up Notes.app while I’m reading the assigned cases and take notes in real time, using the split-screen multitasking.

Kindle isn’t having that, though! Not even for a second. If I want to have access to the thousands of dollars worth of textbooks that I have purchased through the service, I need to dedicate all of my attention to the book itself. This rigid dictation of my behavior, however, doesn’t actually change my behavior at all. I am still multitasking, just doing so far more aggravatingly and far more slowly by manually switching between my Kindle books and Notes.app. It almost makes my head spin. Scratch that — it makes my head spin.

Honestly, it’s asinine that Kindle hasn’t been updated to support iOS 9's split-view multitasking functionality. iOS 9 was released to the public on September 16, 2015. That is more than three months ago, at the time of this writing. Worse still, iOS 9 and it’s multitasking support were not some surprise release in mid-September. Nay, the update and its feature-set were announced at Apple’s annual World Wide Developers Conference in June of 2015. That’s right. Amazon has known about split-view multitasking for OVER SEVEN MONTHS. Still, they neglect implementing it. Truly, this is unbelievably negligent behavior. I (and I’m sure many college and graduate students are in the same boat) have given thousands of dollars to Amazon for access to my textbooks. Nevertheless, this is how they treat us — they don’t give a single shit.

Rigid OS X Window

The Mac OS X Kindle app isn’t much better. Granted, I can view my books and my notes at the same time, but I find iOS (and the iPad’s) multitasking far superior, and less distracting, than that of OS X in the context of college course work, both in-classroom and out. I’m not sure I’m totally sold on iOS and the iPad for getting my traditional office work done, but there is no doubt in my mind that OS X has the potential to be far more distracting during the course of my studies.

Nevertheless, the Kindle for OS X app is also punitively rigid and unwieldy. I understand that, in it’s current iteration, this feature is impossible to execute on iOS, but the nature of OS X doesn’t impose such limitations:

Why can I not view multiple books at the same time?

On OS X, I can open a million Pages/Word documents, if I want. I can have an ungodly amount of safari Windows and tabs open. I can only have one Kindle book open.

It makes no sense. I understand that this is a VERY niche complaint — much more niche that my prior complaint of no multitasking support on iOS. Nevertheless, it’s a weirdly rigid limitation that I’m running into this semester. I currently have a class, and a professor, which requires a regular casebook and then also a rule book. The professor will bounce between the two during discussion like it’s no big deal, and to somebody burdened with two physical books it might not be. On Kindle, however, this is a chore. I have to completely close my case book, find and open the rule book, and then find the proper page. In the time it takes to merely get there, the discussion of the rule could conceivably be over (and I’d have to navigate back to the case book). Again, it makes my head spin.

This is certainly not an option on iPad, although I would like to see something happen on that front — be it iOS system-level reimagining of how apps work or a nifty tweak a la Sidefari, or both — soon.

This isn’t the biggest deal on the planet, but it strikes me as arbitrary and overbearing and certainly odd. There’s no good reason I can imagine for limiting the number of books open on OS X, and yet the limitation is still arbitrarily imposed by the powerhouse.