Taposé's Split Screen For The iPad: A Visual Tour

Taposé (pronounced "tap-oh-ZAY"), a new note-taking app by Zanther, Inc., addresses a problem a lot of iPad users probably wish they didn't have to endure: switching back and forth between two full-screen apps in order to copy and paste items. Taposé lets you split the iPad screen into two side-by-side panes. It comes with five apps that work in the dual panes: Journals, a note-taking app; Web, an integrated browser; Maps, a subset of Google Maps; Contacts, which accesses the iPad's contact list; and Calculator. You can display any two apps at once, or work with two views of the same app. Unfortunately, version 1.0 of Taposé has a beta roughness about it with too many limitations to be useful. I wouldn't rely on it for creating polished business documents.

Taposé's main claim to fame is its ability to display two apps simultaneously. To split the screen, you simply pull the black slide bar on the left (with the pencil cup icon) to the middle of the screen and voila, a second panel. Any of the five included apps can be launched in either panel, and--with the exception of the calculator--the same app can be in both panes at the same time. For instance, you could view two Web pages or two of your Journal pages at once. The slide bar also serves as a clipboard. Unfortunately, clipping is limited and might be a little buggy. For instance, only Map pushpins can be copied to the clipboard and once they've been pasted into a Journal page they're inactive and useless. The Calculator does not work with the clipboard at all. When I tried to select an image from a Web page that had multiple images, sometimes the image made it into the clipboard, and sometimes it didn't.