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.
Reception seems bad for either hand (Score:1, Interesting)
Privacy Violations are BS (Score:3, Interesting)
MuscleNerd, one of the, if not THE foremost Apple device hacker out there has implied he has done code inspection and just through common sense says its all BS.
There are a few tweets on the matter but this is one of the more telling:
http://twitter.com/MuscleNerd/status/16876551921
makes little technical sense (Score:3, Interesting)
Apple's restrictions on multitasking make little sense from a technical point of view. From other platforms, we know that is not a major battery drain, and it's perfectly possible for a scheduler to do automatically whatever Apple's special APIs are trying to achieve.
Unless Apple just doesn't know what they are doing, the real reason behind Apple's restrictions on multitasking is more likely the same as their restrictions on scripting languages and alternative development environments: they want to keep control. With multitasking, you could run local file servers and local web servers. You could create new applications delivery platforms, local music servers, and a local file system and file manager.
Re:You forgot one (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Here's your roundup (Score:2, Interesting)
Why do we always feel obligated to put that at the end of our posts? Don't get me wrong, I do it all the time. But your entire most was I this and I that, you never once used the word "you". So of course its your opinion and you aren't speaking for others. But if you don't say it you risk people flaming back.
I do it because people asking why I'm including it is far less annoying than people asking why I'm "presenting my opinion like it's the only one that matters" :-) You're a regular around here...I'm sure you've seen it.
Reception Issue - Hacked (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Here's your roundup (Score:5, Interesting)
I remember my first Sprint phone, which had a four-note polyphonic midi player built-in, and I was so excited, I started to make my own midi files, but couldn't figure out how to import them. I called their support and they said that it was impossible, that this was special encoded data and all ring tones had to be purchased.
I called BS on it, and told them that it was all bits, and I should be able to do what I wanted. The support monkey said no.
A few weeks later, someone leaked the information; turns out you just needed a special HTTP header line to tell the phone that it was a Sprint-sanctioned ring tone, and it would download fine. Once it was published, I wrote a script to allow me to upload a MIDI file to my web site, which would then send a text message with the right URL to access it to my phone, and I would download it. It was awesome.
A month later, Sprint came out with phones that allowed the user to edit midi files right on the phone itself.
I guess I'm getting old. I'm sure there was a point in there somewhere. Maybe it's that all of the cell phone vendors and service providers have their own control issues. If you don't like it, as you say, vote with your wallet.
Re:makes little technical sense (Score:5, Interesting)
From other platforms, we know that is not a major battery drain, and it's perfectly possible for a scheduler to do automatically whatever Apple's special APIs are trying to achieve.
Um, even Google acknowledges that multitasking hurts battery life. [loopinsight.com] As a geek, that's an acceptable tradeoff because you know about it. For the average consumer that can barely distinguish the difference between Li-Poly and Lipitor, all they'll know is that the battery life on their iPhone sucks and Apple is totally to blame.
With multitasking, you could run local file servers and local web servers. You could create new applications delivery platforms, local music servers, and a local file system and file manager.
With the iPhone, Apple succeeded in selling a smartphone to consumers by hiding all the complexities of a smartphone like the filesystem and a file manager. And you want to undo all of that? Maybe perhaps Apple didn't design the iPhone for geeks like you.
To summarize.... (Score:2, Interesting)
One guy doesn't like how multitasking works. He thinks the multitasking tray is cluttered.
Somebody unidentified alleged that Apple is tracking jailbreaks.
I assume there's a story about lots of people waiting in lines, but that one's blocked here at work. (ComputerWorld had a story recently about what was likely to happen today, and was predicting lines. They also mentioned eBay prices of up to fifteen thousand dollars for an iPhone.)
One person is having problems when touching the lower left corner of one iPhone. Neither the other one the guy bought that day nor the review model had that problem.
CmdrTaco is desperate for iPhone news to put on the front page.
park the jurassic a bit... (Score:3, Interesting)
Why the "open it" movement is called a movement, is exactly, because it began in circumstances, were not much was open.
Being consumer oriented, by decidinig, what a costumer should be able to do, and what not, is only decided by what makes first mentioned become second mentioned in greatest percentages, nothing more.
The iPhone is for people who want to use a cool gadget, not for people who want to have a gadget for all their things they want to use it to.
And yes, everybody is both a little bit. That's why adapting of dinosaurs does not build upon change of "antiquated" views, but instead on having an idealistic opinion while getting a realistic attitude.
Multi-tasking (Score:5, Interesting)
Ever since I've had an iPhone, I've wondered what the obsession is with multitasking. I couldn't really think of any two *productive* things to do simultaneously on a phone. On a PC (by that I mean a desktop, laptop, netbook), I can appreciate the need to go do some other design work while you render a huge video, or burn a DVD, or OCR a huge document. On a phone, I can't, off-hand, think of much CPU-intensive stuff that can run for an extended time without needing to stop for user input. Because of that, productivity is lost because you're having to stop and switch apps all the time. The meaning of "EMACS" is true. Editors Make All Computers Slow. If the device is waiting for user input, then its speed (or multitasking ability) is moot.
Wanting to Pandora to keep streaming while you tweet is *not* a productivity enhancer; it's merely letting you be a little more streamlined about wasting your time (kinda like texting while you watch TV). Now, I know I'm sounding like an old "all work, no play" curmudgeon about this (and get off my lawn, too!). Don't get me wrong. I agree that being able to keep Pandora going while I do other stuff is a nicety, but I don't think that something like that is such a "must have" thing that it warrants all of the articles and posts we've seen demanding that Apple make significant changes to the OS and its API in order to make it possible. I'd never once make the argument that the iPhone OS has some glaring hole in its functionality because I can't listen to music while I'm sending a text.
Yet, Apple caved and gave it to us anyway. So now, the dude who wrote the article is mad because he can't go do something else while a YouTube video loads. Breaking story: If you're visiting YouTube, you've already decided that your time isn't valuable. I read another article where a guy was mad because he couldn't go switch to something else in the 5-6 seconds while a page loads in Safari (probably while he's driving, too).
My position on full background-execution multitasking remains unchanged from the first time I tried a Windows Mobile phone after being a Palm user for years. With a small device like a phone, it's just too easy for a user to rack up this huge array of crap running in the background without realizing it. And that, potentially, has a greater impact on your productivity since it will gobble up the power in your battery. With a PC, you've got a task bar or a dock to see what you've got running. In addition, there's a one-click way of shutting off the app. Whenever a Windows Mobile user would have me look at their phone to fix it, I'd find that they had a half-dozen things still running: control panel, mail, notepad, contacts... all of these things were things where they had finished their work with those apps, but they either didn't realize that they had to close the apps or they were too lazy to press "Menu->File->Quit". Instead, they just went back to the home screen and started the next app they wanted.
Personally, I think that Apple's compromise is a good one. If your app doesn't have a compelling reason to keep executing (like streaming audio, getting GPS updates for navigation, etc.), then the most your app really needs is just to have its state saved for quick re-launch.
Re:Here's your roundup (Score:2, Interesting)
I guarantee you within 10 years every Apple computer will use its trusted computing module to disallow you from running unsigned code. Apple is trailblazing this technology on mobile devices today, getting people accustomed to it and even astonishingly getting their more fanatical users to defend their use of it to restrict their activities. Unbelievable. You'll need to join the Apple developer program and pay your yearly fee to them just to write code for your own computer and they'll do it all under the guise of preserving "performance" and "security".
iPhone 4, can NOT Upload 720p Videos to youtube (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Multitasking complaint is kind of bogus (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Wrong about multitasking (Score:1, Interesting)
Fair enough, but since he didn't, I will.
Maemo 5 does it lots better.
Plenty of justified criticism about the N900's lack of polish in many areas, but the multitasking is done right.
I'm afraid, however, it does really require a high-res screen to look good -- the iPhone 4 would be fine, but the iPad and older iPhones would look kinda pixel-clunky displaying 12 running apps on one screen. Shouldn't be a problem for Apple, though, as they excel at UI design and refinement; maybe something a little coverflowish would do the trick.
Re:Developer's Perspective (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Wrong about multitasking (Score:4, Interesting)
It's just not a well-designed feature.
I disagree, I think it's simple and elegant. A stack with the most recently run app always moving to the top (left) makes sense to me and I've found switching between the handful of apps I'm using during any given period really efficient. Any app I'm not actively switching back to naturally falls away as recently viewed apps move in front of it.
If you don't delete them manually, eventually all your apps are going to appear there, and what the hell is the use of that?
It really doesn't matter how deep the stack goes (though I assume there is some arbitrary limit). It's not as if they add any visual clutter since you have to actively scroll to see them and as mentioned above, if you didn't use an app recently the natural thing to do is to use it's icon on the home page. It's only confusing if you think you have to manually manage each app's state. But the whole point behind Apple's limited multi-tasking and UI is that the end user should not have to manage an app's state.
There needs to be a way of quitting apps without adding them to the bar.
And there is the rub. You don't typically "quit" an iOS app, you switch away from it. Whether the app actually exits or not is determined by the app and iOS. You can choose to force the app to exit, but there is rarely any need (so far the only reason I've forced an app to close was to see how that changed it's behavior next time I switched to it.)