TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Brent Simmons wants to solve a problem with iPhone OS:

On Macs we have a long-standing culture of apps working together. I can think of a few examples from my own Mac app: you can send a podcast to iTunes, send an article to Twitterrific to tweet it, or send an article to MarsEdit to post it to your weblog.

Of course, on a Mac, the calling app doesn’t quit when you do these things. It stays open. You can get right back to it. (In some cases, the calling app stays in front the whole time, like when sending a podcast from NetNewsWire to iTunes.)

On the iPad (and iPhone) we can sort-of do the same thing.

His idea is to add a parameter to the URLs iPhone OS currently uses for inter-application communication so the application being called can return the user to the calling application. To use Brent’s example, if you want to subscribe to a site’s feed you find in Twitterrific, you could tap “Subscribe in NetNewsWire,” it would send you to NetNewsWire (which would subscribe to the feed), and once done, would then send you back to where you were in Twitterrific.

It’s a good idea, but couldn’t Apple just build in a way for the second application to handle small tasks like this in the background? That way, you could tap subscribe in Twitterrific and NetNewsWire would do its thing in the background, then close, so you never even leave Twitterrific. Would this confuse the iPhone OS’s one application at a time paradigm?