Great scheduled notification idea!

I came up with another sort of solution to the multi-tasking problem of task switching which I think might even be better and more intuitive than actually switching apps. (no matter how fast app switching is, it's still an inconvenience to the user)

http://techdropbox.blogspot.com/2010/02/iphoneos-multi-tasking-alternative.html

wonder if apple will eventually provide or allow for something similar.

Hope you will give me a critique/feedback,

thanks,
yitz..

@Jason It's fine to disagree :-) However I would argue that (a) we've had plenty of experience with both desktop and mobile devices having full multitasking, so scope for new "killer app" categories we haven't thought of that require it is going to be much smaller. (b) There are also other competing devices out there now (albeit with their own problems) and the launch of the iPad is doubtless going to bring out a whole lot more. You can bet there will be devices *very* similar to the iPad but which expose multi-tasking. We'll have a chance to see (1) whether "users will flock to the platform" and (2) whether such a killer app arises.

I totally agree that there are trade-offs here, but my opinion is that they are best balanced in favour of simplicity. For me "simplicity" is a killer app in itself!
As for "limiting innovation" I think it's important to see the big picture here. There are a number of axes along which innovation can be enabled or disabled - and by the nature of innovation it would be foolish for us to think we know which ones they will occur on. Some of these axes run in both directions (ok the analogy is stretching here), so innovation may be enabled in one or the other direction - but not both. It is not possible to enable innovation in every possible direction. I believe that multi-tasking and simplicity run in virtually the opposite directions and *either* could enable innovation - but as I said I don't think anyone can know for sure.

@Nate:
1) If you followed the command line I gave for creating the disk image then what I said at that point should apply, "The disk image doesn't take up that space to start with, but will grow up to the size you specify here, so use it to set an upper limit.". That has been my understanding and I've had no experience that suggests otherwise so far. When all that space is used up then TimeMachine will start deleting the oldest historical versions until the whole volume is filled up only with the latest versions. At that point, the next time it attempts a backup it will fail with a message telling you why. I *have* had experience of that.
2) Yes you can either restore a new machine from a backup of another machine, browse the backup set using the Time Machine interface or just open the raw file system in the disk image and copy from there (that's what I usually do). All the historical versions appear as folders so you can easily see what is the latest and what is historical (although they may refer to the same files, of course).

Dude, thanks for this post. I wish all solutions were as clear and concise as this one. I have a mac mini and a mac book pro. (New to the mac stuff as of about 8 months.... .NET guy moving to the darkside). I have a stand along PC that I use as a file server. I stupidly thought that I need time capsule to make backups or use time machine. Well that wasn't the case and then I thought, well, I can't use time machine on a network drive. I talked with a co-worker and he convinced me to give it a shot on my network drive. After a few days of frustration, I came across this. Worked the very first time I treid it. Thanks a lot man.

I have 2 questions:

1) The volumes I created are 100GB (for the mini) and 280GB (for the mac book pro). As time goes on, will backups extended pass 100GB and 280GB? Or once it approachs that mark, will it start to truncate the older history/backups. I ask because these locations are on a file server and I don't want my hard drive to fill up with backups. If this is the case, I need to put in a dedicated hard drive just for backups.

2) If someone was to steal either the mini or the mac book pro...and I buy a new one....even though the time machine backups reside on a network share, will I still be able to restore/transfer from time machines?

Thanks again

The problem is that just because we can't think of something, doesn't mean that nobody ever will. How many people saw the potential of something like twitter the first time they'd used it? How much use did people get out the internet when it was first created? By not creating a system for background applications, the iPhone limits innovation in mobile applications. This is the real problem. (And just to be clear, I agree that simplicity is important. But I also think users will flock to the platform that provides the next killer app, which Apple may be missing out on.)

I have spaces in my computer name and I had to use absolute paths, so my command looked like this:

sudo hdiutil create -size 320g -type SPARSEBUNDLE -nospotlight -volname "Backup of Rahil's MacBook Pro" -fs "Case-sensitive Journaled HFS+" -verbose "/Users/rahil/Desktop/Rahil's MacBook Pro_d49a21014d72.sparsebundle"