iPhone 4 News Roundup 568
We have a slew of iPhone 4-related stories this morning, so I'm lumping them together for easier consumption/ignoring, depending on your personal feelings on the subject.
Here is a blog entry proclaiming that iOS 4 multitasking sucks and why. Here is a sketchy summary of privacy violations by Apple and AT&T — apparently they are reporting back jailbroken phones. Skunkpost has a story about the lines and sales of the new phone. But the big news of the morning is the reception problems that apparently only affect people who hold the phone in their left hands.
Re:You forgot one (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Left handed (Score:1, Informative)
Re:You forgot one (Score:5, Informative)
Apple is using a bonding agent called Organofunctional Silane Z-6011 to bond the layers of glass. Apparently, Apple (or more likely Foxconn) is shipping these products so quickly that the evaporation process is not complete. However, after one or two days of use, especially with the screen on, will complete the evaporation process and the yellow "blotches" will disappear. How do I know? I was involved in pitching Z-6011 to Apple.
No one is denying that it exists, its just that it could very well just be the bonding agent not drying yet.
Re:Here's your roundup (Score:3, Informative)
See, that's the frustrating thing: I really like the hardware, and I find the interface to be fairly intuitive...were it not for locking people into their own store (and were it not for being stuck with AT&T), I would very likely own an iPhone. So long as appstore lock-in and AT&T exclusivity are around though, I won't be a paying customer.
Not trolling... (Score:5, Informative)
Seriously, is anyone else getting tired of the daily Apple story on the iPhone?
I get it, it's tech that people like, but do we really need daily updates on it? This site tends to be a heavy linux advocate and there is a nice writeup of the EVO 4G on Ars today. Not a peep of that though, MORE APPLE!
What the fuck are you talking about? (Score:3, Informative)
Android supports full preemptive multitasking, thanks to it being built on Linux.
You do realize that you can't change reality, or the pain that you suffer from due to having bought an iPhone, by spreading outright lies about non-Apple devices and software, right?
Regardless of what you say or believe, Android will still support preemptive multitasking, while iOS does not.
Re:Multitasking complaint is kind of bogus (Score:3, Informative)
My iPhone's tray is six icons wide [modmyi.com], you insensitive clod!
Re:iOS4 = Windows 3.0? (Score:5, Informative)
iPhone has preemptive multitasking, too, it's just not fully exposed to applications.
However, a misbehaving application cannot prevent others from running, which was the case with true cooperative multitasking OSes, such as Win3.x.
They did (Score:5, Informative)
The new iPhone actually does address a lot of the calling complaints.
If you read the engadget review, the metal external antenna really do improve signal and ( for them) eliminated dropped calls.
The speakers are supposed to be improved for hearing people, and the phone had two microphones now so it can do noise cancelation.
Basically, they did a lot of things to improve call quality.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Multitasking as the dev's responsiblity. Common? (Score:4, Informative)
From the TechWorld iOS4 multitasking article [techworld.com] in the summary:
Waiting for a YouTube video to buffer over a 3G connection? It won't go anywhere unless you're staring at the loading screen.
Honestly, doesn't this also happen by default with applications on other mobile OS'es like Android, unless the developer specifies otherwise in the app's code?
From what I understand about the Android application life cycle under normal circumstances, once an Activity (the app's presentation layer, what you interact with) is completely obscured, the application's host process becomes a "background" process. Meaning, the app's Activities aren't visible and there are no Services running, thereby making the app's host process one of the first processes to be killed off so to allocate resources. (Service example: a media player running in the background while you're actively using another app). For an app's host process to remain in an active state, the app must have a running Activity, Service or Broadcast Receiver. In my following the Android dev tutorials, I've seen that only the Activity is absolutely required - Services and Broadcast Receivers are added only when you need them for your app to fulfill it's intended purpose.
So, in the case of buffering the YouTube video, if I were writing an Android app to do just that, I'd have to have explicitly created a Service to keep buffering the video while I used another app. If I didn't create a Service to keep buffering when the app's Activity exited the active state, then my app would do just what the article says - the app does nothing until I explicitly return to the app.
Am I missing something?
Re:Multitasking as the dev's responsiblity. Common (Score:2, Informative)
But most apps won't do anything except go to sleep, which means one of the classic tricks of multitasking, loading one task while you perform another, is not available unless the developer adds that function under a special task completion API. Some apps, such as Flickr, may take advantage of this feature for large file transfers, but others won't. Waiting for a YouTube video to buffer over a 3G connection? It won't go anywhere unless you're staring at the loading screen.
Re:Multitasking complaint is kind of bogus (Score:4, Informative)
The article complains that to enable multitasking, developers have to change code. Is that really a serious complaint or is the author complaining just to complain. Things don't automagically happen in everyday life. If multitasking were enabled by default then any and all apps that you open would run continuously in the background. That would use all the memory and the battery. And the phone would eventually crash as it ran out of resources. And how many apps actually to need to run in the background as opposed to merely suspending? Did the author not think about that?
Re:Here's your roundup (Score:2, Informative)
What application is it that you're desperate to use that has been barred from the app store? I'm just curious.
Google Voice?
Re:Multitasking complaint is kind of bogus (Score:4, Informative)
Re:What the fuck are you talking about? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Multitasking complaint is kind of bogus (Score:3, Informative)
It is not a multitasking tray - it is the most recently used apps, whether or not those apps support the fake multitask apis.
Re:Here's your roundup (Score:1, Informative)
And the computer you get will be fast and secure, and there will be people who will quite happily pay Apple's price for it. And if you don't like it, you can always buy a copy of Google Windows(tm) down the street for less money which is more "open", but slower, less secure, and clunkier.
As much as Linux zealots like to rant about Choice(tm), very few of them seem to understand that it's my choice to surrender unsigned code in exchange for performance, stability, ease of use, functionality, and my own sanity. And believe me, as an IT professional dealing with vendors' crap all day, my sanity is worth a lot to me.
Re:Do you understand preemptive multitasking? (Score:3, Informative)
Preemptive multitasking is a feature of the kernel which iOS fully supports, it however restricts access to it for regular applications except through a small set of APIs.
Add to the news: Exchange integration is broken. (Score:2, Informative)
I upgraded the OS on my 3GS, and I can't get anything from the Exchange server now. It's just giving me "can't connect to server." (Interestingly, it pulls my list of Inbox folders but not my mail or calendar, and still tells me it can't connect.)
It worked fine before the OS upgrade to the phone, and nothing's changed on the Exchange environment. (I'm the Exchange admin.)
There seem to be lots of posts about this on Apple's site, but nothing I have tried has fixed this issue yet.
So if you have an iPhone and sync with an Exchange server.... WAIT to upgrade until they patch this.
Re:Here's your roundup (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Wrong about multitasking (Score:3, Informative)
Developer's Perspective (Score:5, Informative)
From a developer's perspective, iOS is the platform to beat.
Median iOS developer income per app: $682 per year [blogs.com].
Re:Multi-tasking (Score:3, Informative)
There is a great deal of value in making things accessible to non-techies, and in order to do that you have to remove a lot of choices.
You don't have to remove choices, you just have to hide them. For example, my Android phone did not allow installation of non-Market apps out of the box - but this could be turned on by digging into advanced options. Better yet, use something like "about:config" in Firefox, which requires specific knowledge and deliberate intent to activate, and cannot be discovered by chance alone.
The problem is that Apple doesn't want you to give that choice at all. To get back to the example of installing apps from third-party sources, not only iPhone does not provide any way to disable this feature, but the third-party workaround to do so - jailbreaking - is claimed by Apple to be in violation of the law (DMCA anti-circumvention provisions), so they clearly don't want you to do that.
On a larger system, it's easier to have more choices but to hide them normally. On a handheld, this is a lot less practical.
Why is it less practical? How, exactly, a handheld is different in that regard?
Re:Reception Issue - Hacked (Score:3, Informative)
Wow, that's a really specific allergy. I guess people can be allergic to about anything. But I've never heard of being allergic to a specific metal before.
It's really common, actually. It sounds like the GP has a stronger allergy to nickel, but lots of people are alergic to nickle in earings and other jewelry, as I am. I can't wear cheap costume earings, only stainless steel, or high grade silver or gold. Yeah, that's how I roll...
Sensitized individuals may show an allergy to nickel affecting their skin, also known as dermatitis. Sensitivity to nickel may also be present in patients with pompholyx. Nickel is an important cause of contact allergy, partly due to its use in jewellery intended for pierced ears.[43] Nickel allergies affecting pierced ears are often marked by itchy, red skin. Many earrings are now made nickel-free due to this problem. The amount of nickel which is allowed in products which come into contact with human skin is regulated by the European Union. In 2002 researchers found amounts of nickel being emitted by 1 and 2 Euro coins far in excess of those standards. This is believed to be due to a galvanic reaction
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel#Toxicity [wikipedia.org]
My favorite:
It was voted Allergen of the Year in 2008 by the American Contact Dermatitis Society.
That's gotta be a fun awards ceremony..
Re:What the fuck are you talking about? (Score:5, Informative)
Try again. iPhone apps can't call the equivalent even of Windows 3.1 yield(); - they either run in the foreground, or they're suspended - like the DOS 5.0 task swapper.
Don't be disingenuous. The parent was correct; iOS has a kernel with a preemptive task scheduler, and there are any number of API calls which explicitly yield or do the moral equivalent (any blocking I/O API call). Even while an app runs in the foreground it is always being multitasked with other parts of the system.
Also, by definition tasks in a preemptive multitasking OS either run or are suspended, at the operating system's whim. The difference between that and a system like DOS 5 is left as an exercise for the reader.
The few exceptions need to take advantage of a special api call for music, of all things.
And other 'special' APIs for other things. Apple has tried to come up with a comprehensive list of tasks which can usefully be backgrounded on a smartphone, such as messaging, downloads, and yes, audio playback. You simply register a thread (process? dunno the exact details) as providing such a service, and the OS allows it to continue to receive timeslices (assuming it's not blocked on I/O) while your main application is held suspended because it's not in the foreground. There are significant limits on what you can do in that context, but they all make sense in terms of limiting power consumption.
If you want a real multi-tasking OS on your phone, you won't get it from Apple. Not this year, and not next year. They're already starting to fall behind in the features race.
Oh please. You're smart enough to know that iOS is built on the Darwin kernel, and what that implies about its multitasking capabilities. All the limitations are deliberate and carefully thought out. It's undeniable that they're there because Apple thinks they will provide a better overall user experience, because the path of least effort for Apple would have let users multitask anything on day 1 of the app store going live. Instead they went to the trouble of doing extra work to restrict it.
Argue against the design of iOS 4's carefully limited multitasking if you like (oh no! That would require you to actually inform yourself! Can't have that), but pretending it's not "real" and that they're falling years behind is just trollish.
Re:Reception Issue - Hacked (Score:2, Informative)
Re:makes little technical sense (Score:3, Informative)
Lifespan of iPhone is already artificially limited. With the current prices of flash, how small part of it mobile OSes actually need, and how large part of this storage is almost always static anyway, there shouldn't be much of a problem when FS is aware of the issue and rotates the space used as swap every now and then.
Symbian devices support virtual memory for some time now, and there was no wave of them suddenly starting to die.