I am not the only one who is apprehensive about Stage Manager. Steve Troughton-Smith elaborated his concerns in a thread on Twitter, and even echoes my consternation around the lack of names.

I don’t think Apple has figured out the nouns & verbs of the important elements of multi-window multitasking — what is an ‘app’, ‘window’, where does it live? Where does it go when I put it away? iPadOS is all just a soup of recent tasks that may be running, cached, or ghosts

The lack of names suggests to me that Stage Manager is not conceptually complete and incomplete concepts is how iPadOS multitasking got to where it is today. Here’s what I wrote about iPad multitasking back in January:

A UI needs to fundamentally answer three questions: Where am I now? Where is the thing I want? How do I get there? Before multitasking and in iOS today, this was straight forward. There was a home screen and apps. How do I get to Safari? Hit the home button and tap on the Safari app. With split views and multitasking, there doesn’t even seem to be a canonical lexicon to describe where things are. What is the noun for the thing that is being split? Is it a view? Maybe it’s a window? Okay, so how do I get to that Safari “window”? Maybe it’s on that “screen”, but that’s also not really a term Apple uses as far as I am aware.

• Where am I now?
• Where is the thing I want?
• How do I get there?

iPadOS couldn’t answer those questions back in January. That it seemingly still can’t with Stage Manager is worrisome, to say the least.