Quote:
Originally Posted by
MeCourious 
I agree. We all assume that everyone knows all about computers. But most of my friends just want to use a device that works. If I told them they had to manage which programs were running and which ones were not, they probably wouldn't use it. It's just too much to think about.
Most people have a thousand other things on their minds (kids, bills, jobs, TV, etc). They bought the iphone because they wanted something that just worked. Multi-tasking sounds great for us who spend most of our lives on a computer. But think for once about your friends and relatives. I hope Apple is thinking about them. Because once they implement multi-tasking, the haters will just jump to some other missing feature in the hope to force Apple to follow what they consider is the perfect business plan.
This is just a crazy left-field kind of thought, but since people most definitely *don't* want to "manage" their phones (you are dead right about that IMO), maybe Apple could give the control to the developer instead of the user.
I'm no programmer, but perhaps they could provide some small set of standard "background pipes" for lack of a better word, that developers could use but that the user need not be aware of at all. For instance it seems to me that the only real uses of multitasking on what is essentially a single window system are:
1) music in the background
2) suspending a game when you get a call.
If this just happened automatically because Apple provides the *developer* with a secure backgrounding system, it seems to me this would solve the problem. The user could start Pandora for instance, and when they close it, it simply keeps playing. If they don't
want it to keep playing, even a non-techie user could easily surmise that going back to the app and hitting the stop button would fix it. Just like the iPod app is now basically. The background "audio pipe" would only support one app at a time for obvious reasons, and if you started a second app that needed it, it would shut down the first. All of that could esily be seamless and automatic.
If we take it as a given that users don't want to manage their apps, then the only solution that really seems to work IMO is one where it all happens automatically. Then they just add a system daemon that harshly shuts apps down if someone is determined enough to run ten or twelve background apps and memory gets really bad. Almost all users would never encounter any problems or even know anything was different. They would just know that Pandora keeps playing when you leave it now.
