Multitasking In For iPhone 4.0? 345
The latest word on the iPhone is that the 4.0 OS will finally have
honest-to-goodness multitasking. This could hopefully lead to things like a real chat client, and dangerous battery consumption. I still hope it's true.
ipad might be worthwile (Score:3, Insightful)
this would be AWESOME for the ipad, might even make it worthwhile.
i'll believe it when i see it (Score:3, Insightful)
They haven't been phones for years (Score:3, Insightful)
It's a computer with wireless.
I hope it's optional in settings (Score:5, Insightful)
There are real uses for multitasking, which the iPhone already does - like listening to iPod while surfing or the like. Maybe chat as mentioned, but I also hope to set which apps can be multitasking - I don't trust the developers always to make the correct call - there is no reason to leave a game running in the background while I surf, it would be better to save state. I would actually say saving state and resuming again is better the vast majority of times over running in the background.
But oftentimes I try to hang up the phone by hitting the home button instead of the end call button (even though I think I did), and while surfing, I still see that "Return to Call" blinking on top.
To conserve battery life, I already turned off push notifications and other things. And I would turn off multitasking for my parents phones, they hardly can use a computer as it. With this, they'll only be wondering why the phone battery is dying even faster.
Re:A minor point... (Score:2, Insightful)
That's funny. My android device can multitask (any app, not just the ones Apple lets you multitask with), and the battery life is solid as well.
Perhaps Apple is full of shit and just wanted to shaft users/developers again?
Re:A minor point... (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally, I prefer it this way. When I'm using any app the only thing I want interrupting me is a phone call. And the only thing I want running in the background is iPod, which already does. If multitasking third party apps becomes an option I'll probably turn it off.
Re:A minor point... (Score:5, Insightful)
There are plenty of UI design concerns as well. Currently there is no standard UI for dealing with apps running in the background. The phone gives you a green bar across the top of the screen. The iPod gives you a special alert with buttons when you double click the home button and a play icon in the top right of the screen. The calendar doesn't have any UI at all, it just alerts you with a message. The Mail app displays a numeric badge and plays a sound (a feature available to all 3rd party apps using the notification API).
It will be interesting to see how they unify the UI for running multiple apps at once without compromising the usability of the device.
My guess is that everything will basically look and function the same, except the App's icon will have a glow or a badge indicating that it is running in the background. Each app will have to explicitly be granted permission to be able to run in the background by the user (same way each app has to be allowed to send notifications now).
It's already been there (Score:5, Insightful)
not sure why (Score:5, Insightful)
In the old days, we had background processes that always had to run. Now we have signals and the like that can awake idle processes so they do not have to run. Then we had TSR applications, and similar items on the Mac, like the Talking Moose. The former was created to solve the long start up time of applications on DOS and Windows. Multiple windows and such were useful on the PC, with larger screens, but somewhat harder to use on the Mac. The Mac seemed to launch applications faster, so I don't have a recollections of being annoyed that Finder was not multitasking.
Multitasking is a solution to solve some problem on the general computer. I am not sure it is the right solution for a small screen mobile small battery device. I would rather see innovative solutions rather than rehashing the same old thing. I think there this might be a useful solution for the iPad. My concern is that iPhone 4.0 is built for the next iPhone, and will make current iPhones harder to use. This is what happened with iPhone 3.0, which does not run very well on the first generation iPhone.
Re:They haven't been phones for years (Score:3, Insightful)
That's their loss.
Re:A minor point... (Score:3, Insightful)
Multitasking has never been a huge security problem, so long as inter-process communication is disabled. Sure, it introduces file and device access control issues, but the OS should be handling that properly, multitasking or not.
For the record, the iPhone does have the ability for apps to save their state, which is a poor man's multitasking. But true multitasking isn't really necessary in a form factor like the iPhone. A desktop PC, sure, a laptop, maybe, but it's rare to ever be doing multiple things at once on a device as small as the iPhone.
At most, you're listening to music while reading an electronic document (because most other apps come with sound already), but it's possible to avoid multitasking by putting the music playback calls into libraries behind an API and let the individual apps use it if/when they want to.
The iPad, which falls closer to the iPhone than the laptop in terms of capability, has a better case for multitasking beyond state-saves. It is possibly a technical limitation, that there'd be enough programs running of a sufficient size in a typical usage scenario that the background processes wouldn't all fit into RAM or swap. I suspect the enabling of multitasking is for that more than anything else, as to be honest, I'm not sure why the iPad, with its closed environment, would need multitasking otherwise. It's not like somebody's going to be encoding their MP3's while running a FTP daemon while compiling code while reading a document. And while a regular tablet could be rendering a scene in the background, the iPad's closed environment makes that use case likewise highly unlikely.
As the iPhone already has multi-threading, even IM's and chatting can be handled without multitasking. They can be processed the same way as text messages (but perhaps without the preempting that happens). It's a matter of the OS being able to properly handle the incoming packets, and the application being able to smartly handle the incoming messages.
Re:real chat client (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It's a freakin' PHONE (Score:3, Insightful)
Apple's decision to not include multitasking from the start was likely a decision to keep things as simple as possible. Now they're playing catch-up and tacking on multi-tasking to a system that was built from the ground-up without it. I don't understand how this will not break app compatibility. Existing apps only understand certain "states." Multitasking will introduce new application states that existing apps will not know how to handle. I am very interested in how they plan to reconcile this.
Apologists (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:I hope it's optional in settings (Score:1, Insightful)
If you've ever used another phone that supports it, it's been lacking.
Multitasking is just like copy/paste. When the iphone didn't have it, everyone went on about how they would never use it anyhow and they didn't see what the big deal was. Then when they got it they were blown away by how awesome it is and how they couldn't get by without
Re:A minor point... (Score:2, Insightful)
You haven't really used an iPod Touch or iPhone, have you? You also haven't read many replies in this discussion, or the numerous threads in other discussions that give reasons for multitasking on these devices.
Most games that I've played which have sound allow you to disable it so that you can listen to music. If you use a streaming service to get music, you'd like to continue while performing other tasks.
You have no vision what-so-ever.
Newton / Android style would be good. (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, the kind of background processing that the Newton used, which has some things in common with what Android does (specifically Android "services"), would be awesome. The main problem is that developers are really not used to working this way.
Basically, you have your main app, and it runs when it's in the foreground, and that's it. But you also have these other chunks of code that the app can register with the system. On the Newton you could attach that code to the OS-level alarm mechanism ("when this alarm that I just asked the system service to execute for me at that timestamp fires, don't show a dialog box or play a sound, run this bytecode instead"). On Android, it can be a daemon-like thing that actually runs in the background (eg. to play streaming music).
The fundamental idea is that the whole app isn't doing background processing -- instead you break of very small pieces and those run in the background, under much more severe constraints. (The distinction between cron-like and daemon-like isn't really critical here. The developer still has to be trained to break their app up into distinct pieces with different constraints, instead of having one big app.)
This is simply not the architecture a lot of developers are used to (though Unix folk have a head start). But it's a way to provide actual real usable multitasking on a device like this without crushing the memory and battery usage (especially if you use the alarm-based method and your apps can schedule the alarms far apart; for some apps this is more than adequate).
Some programmers would certainly yell if they had to jump through that kind of hoop. But something like that could very well be the best compromise on these devices.
Re:A minor point... (Score:2, Insightful)
Then the right solution is to allow you to turn it off. Not disallow you from turning it on. I love Apple products, and I admire their dedication to security on the iPhone, but this is not a security issue, it's battery life. And I'd like to make my own choices in that regard, tyvm.
Re:Nokia N900 vs. iPhone 3Gs (Score:1, Insightful)
>> Flipping through the 3Gs icon screens clips and feels choppier.
Total bullshit. I've never seen an iphone (even the original) that had any lag on the home screen, or really most other places. Your iPhone is either broken or you're full of shit. If there's one thing the iPhone does right, it's making sure there is no lag anywhere. I haven't used an N900 so I don't know what it is like in that respect, but I've used several Android phones that were horribly laggy.
Re:A minor point... (Score:4, Insightful)
You prefer being limited to using only Apples music player? Personally on my phone I listen to streams from last.fm as much as I listen to local MP3s, and I wouldn't be able to do that on an iPhone.
Re:I hope it's optional in settings (Score:3, Insightful)
Android 2.1 has a task manager under Settings/Applications/Running Services. I never use it to kill apps though. Apps that don't multitask right get uninstalled from my phone.
Re:A minor point... (Score:4, Insightful)
Its kinda cool - having multitasking on my Symbian phone. While a web page is loading (thanks at&t - fastest network alive... cough cough) I can flip over and check my email, or change a track on an album I'm listening to.
Your argument is so similar to the ones the ms-dos users on our local bbs used to use when I told them how wonderful multi-tasking on my Amiga was. In other words - I don't have it and I'm glad for it!
My response was always something like - I like listening to music, managing files, editing graphics etc etc while responding to this post - while the machine was busy applying a filter, copying a file or playing a mod I was still typing away on another app.
mmmmyep (Score:4, Insightful)
That's great. Good thing the iPhone has a halfway intelligent notification system, isn't it?
Re:It's a freakin' PHONE (Score:3, Insightful)
I think Steve Jobs was just waiting for CPU/memory/battery capacity to catch up to the point where multitasking will be smooth enough that he's happy with it. He's a control freak and a perfectionist, and if something doesn't work just right, he'd rather omit it altogether than include an inferior implementation. That's why Copy & Paste took so long to arrive on iPhone OS.
I'm still using an original 2G iPhone, and I'm wondering whether iPhone OS 4.0 will be able to run on my device. Steve might decide to disallow it if the multitasking performance is not up to par on older devices.
Re:ipad might be worthwile (Score:4, Insightful)
You obviously don't think about the usecases very much.
I was using my Nokia E71 the other day and it was tracking my walking using GPS (Sports tracker) in the background. I was checking directions with Ovi maps and looking things up online in the browser. So all were running at once.
In your world my tracker application would been killed the moment I switched to another tool. That it totally useless and the reason I will never use an iPhone as long as multitasking is missing.
Re:A minor point... (Score:3, Insightful)
My understanding was that music would play in the background, but that the iphone wouldn't download web pages, and email at the same time.