Apple's iPhone 4.0 software to deliver multitasking support - Page 11

iGenius has been given a well needed break for the obsequious nature of his/her/its posts. Said break will be extended if the behaviour continues.

Many thanks,

Graham

THANK YOU

thank you graham. MUCH appreciated!

I am really looking forward to the possibility to use my iphone as a real computer iphone

See you all after WWDC

Why would you allow every single app you run to continue to run in the background? What sense does that make?

I rarely leave apps running in the background, and my little test of pushing my phone's multitasking to it's edge for an entire day just shows it's not as impeding on battery life and performance as people make it out to be. It was a little worse than I said it would be, but it definitely isn't as bad as you make it sound.

Nobody would ever need to run 30 apps in the background. You keep making it sound as if multitasking will be something enormous. It's like somebody saying the iphone would never have copy and paste because copying 10GB files to a clipboard just isn't for a phone.

Multi-tasking isn't a free-for-all with limitless amounts of ability. It does have it's limits, and enforcing those limits are easy and make sense.

BTW, by default WM closes apps automatically, but there are apps out there that prevent this, and instead allow the user to control such a thing.


We just have to agree to disagree. I think Apple has shown enough brilliance that they can incorporate some level of multitasking on the iphone to appease those requesting it, and also not ruin the overall experience of the phone for those who don't need it.

Ahh.... iGenius... obsequious... PosterBoy/Girl/It

*

It doesn't make any sense, which is why the backgrounding system of other mobile platforms is faulty and why Apple will introduce an intelligent system when it's ready.

What we, on this forum, know of how systems work isn't common knowledge. We should not expect that everyone will know that their crossword puzzle app will auto-save their unfinished puzzle so it need not run in the background or that opening an app will keep it running in the background until you install and access a Task Manager app so you delete processes at will. It needs to just work. The Phone didn't make the smartphone market popular for the average person by complicating basic tasks, quite the opposite.

I will be frank as much as I do not agree with iGenius's behaviour banning him for not using foul language,personal attacks or anything that is normally bannable is to me not justifable in my mind

The word “obsequious” is used to describe someone who is almost pathetically eager to follow, obey, and serve. It is often used in a pejorative way, suggesting that someone has rather slavish tendencies which are obnoxious and sometimes embarrassing. Most people make an effort to avoid being obsequious, finding ways to express compliance which are more subtle and less intense than obsequiousness, although in some cultures this servile attitude is considered socially acceptable.

A warning could have been given.

enough said

How do you know it wasn't?

My guess (and it's only a guess) is that an entire discussion took place privately before reaching this point.

Preemptive comment: Always remember that "freedom of the press" gives you the right to publish on your own press, not to publish on someone else's press.

A troll is a troll. Said person has used other accounts to derail discussions so a warning is pointless. You can only pander to those who hijack public discussions so much. A troll doesnt have to use fowl language to grab attention away from the actual topic. Half the posts in this thread are by said troll. Anyone would think the internet revolves around them. Really, life is too short to tiptoe around trolls.

When I phoned O2 UK to alter my tariff they mentioned that the next iPhone will be able to "run 3 or 4 apps at the same time". Obviously I'm dubious whether they'd even know for sure about the next OS, and they may have been dumbing it down rather than say "it will do multitasking". But food for thought anyway. So maybe there will be a hard limit to how many apps can be run at the same time...

Sure it will.

1) iPhone becomes FIPS 140-2 compliant
2) iPhone supports remote provisioning and profile management

That's all we are waiting for. 3) iPhone supports remote loading of corporate developed applications would be double bonus.

And the overriding bonus is not having my data travel through RIMs data center which is in a different country or suffer outages from their infrastructure.

I think Windows Mobile and the iPhone, once the above happens (and it will) are a VERY appealing alternative to the Blackberry.

Let's put it to rest. Enough has been said.

And as soon as Apple achieves FIPS 140-2 certification, that will be the scenario in some parts of DOD land as well... Blackberry's future is FAR from assured. They may remain a significant player, but their dominance will no longer be assured.

I'd recommend everyone just stop replying to him - it would be far more effective

I was commenting on moderator comments concerning the ban. I would prefer moderator do not make comments, but just ban the person. Anyway its happened.

With concern to multitasking, we already have issues with version 3.0+ on iPhone 3G with concern to processor speed (slow down) and battery drain. I am not sure I want to update my iPhone with 4.0, once it arrives.

What a nice attitude. Why are you assuming it's always the users fault? Often it's just bad design - on Windows Mobile you had to use third party managers as there was no way to immediately see what was running in the background!

Heck, even Leo Laporte admitted on a recent TWIT that even he looses track of what is running on his Android phone and it kills his battery - and he's a gadget guy! That's what Apple will do their best to avoid, and based on their past performance I am pretty confident they will succeed.


I accept the limitations of the iPhone because by not poorly implementing multitasking and by forcing programmers to comply with minimum standards I have an awesome and consistent user experience. Frankly that's all I care about, not that some checkbox labeled "mutlitasking" is missing.

No, just too lazy. The roads would be a far more civil place if more people drove standard transmissions.

/never owned a car with an automatic transmission
/never owned a front digger

other ways to classify them:

• the majority of homo sapiens
• more of them than more of techies
• most importantly: the largest pool of potential customers

I dont get into the network arguments either, but I can say just about every time I get a call from one of my iPhone friends the call gets dropped or doesnt connect.

I don't really understand what he did that justifies him "getting a break". I liked the discussion he stirred up here. I have been following this thread just because of the discussion that emerged following his posts.

/snort

OK, Pandora I get. But how exactly do you IM and play a game at the same time? Even if you didn't have the small screen of the iPhone to deal with and were on a desktop computer, you still really can't do both at the same time...

Just as an observation, this was your fourth post.

The App I want to run is FStream. I can listen to any web radio with this application as long as I can find the stream URL. I just love the the way you can put any radio feed into this App.

Please take the next step and ban him for life.

I need a refresher here. Who was asking for 30 apps in the background? Heck, I don't have 30 apps running on my main computer. Even if they do change the policy, I wouldn't be surprised if the limitations were still pretty strict, say you had to specifically enable an app to a background mode, or if it is with more stringent testing.


Far easier said than done. It's a very difficult temptation to resist.


I'm not really seeing the problem with either. To be honest, it sounds pretty dogmatic to me. I don't see how changing transmissions and driveline systems can possibly fix any other stress in life. It just seems like people are acting out because of their life stresses on the road more than anything else.

He got that number from my post regarding the number of app I used the previous day when I questioned the feasibility of a backgrounding system that automatically ran all app you open in the background once opened until the system ran out of resources or you manually quit them. It was my response to running 10 apps with little additional power usage and no performance hit. I just don't think it's the way a consumer friendly phone should operate.

I've rarely had that problem here in New York, despite the publicity involving it. And most of the times when it does happen, the other person says it's their fault, and they're not always on AT&T, sometimes, the horror of it all, they're on Verizon,

I think it's the other way around. The people with manual are more aggressive; more in a hurry.

AND, they're not better drivers. They just think they are.

My ideal implementation of multitasking for the iPhone:

- Pinch out to disperse icons from the main menu.
- This would bring up a Safari-tabs esque menu with thumbnails of each running program.
- You can scroll through them and quit as necessary by "X"-ing out, like you would a Safari tab.

Of course, this would need to be done within reason and RAM storage limitation. Perhaps programs would need to be redone with this functionality to prevent erratic memory issues.

And??

Tom Tom released version 1.3 of their app in the App store today. What's this got to do with anything you may ask?

Well, on the iTunes description for the app it clearly states the following:


"- ADD LOCATIONS from other applications and websites on your iPhone to your Tom Tom app and instantly navigate to them or store them as favourites for future use."

There's no indication on how this is performed within the 1.3 update that shows on the device at the moment. So could this function be only available in iPhone 4.0? Has Tom Tom's 1.3 app introduced a control that can be activated within other apps allowing you to insert an address from an app directly into Tom Tom's favourites?

An interesting development, I think.

Leads me to think iPhone 4.0 will be released for the iPhone upon the iPad being released too.

The iPhone OS, being based on OS X, is multitasking but in common with Unix as I understand it, is not a real-time operating system. Currently, I use apps such as RunKeeper that if implemented in a dedicated device, would employ interrupts either software driven or physical, such as detecting a signal on an input pin. Even if this implementation is provided by the iPhone hardware, OS X is not guaranteed to respond within a certain, guaranteed interval, which is a requirement of a real-time OS.

I wonder therefore, whether allowing arbitrary software to run in the background will impact the performance of time-critical software to the extent that accuracy is affected. I guess that precedents on the MB or MBP would be timing applications and ones that require feedback from the accelerometer. However, I would think that the timing requirement for these applications is less demanding. and the hardware more capable.

Another is SignalScopePro. This excellent app provides an oscilloscope and provides FFTs of signals. However, operation is limited basically to audio frequencies. The application is written too for the Mac OS but is just as susceptible to loss of accuracy through the operating system not servicing requests within a guaranteed interval.

Universal multitasking on the iPhone will probably require capabilities of the OS in managing applications that are probably more sophisticated than even those provided by Mac OS.

Any thoughts?

It's easier to double your marketshare from 4% than from 14%, you know? I believe that's also a fact?

Just that three previous posts hardly makes you an integral member of the AI community.

Why should all of us that want the ability to run third party apps go "fiddle" with Androids or carry laptops, shouls I carry a laptop in a bag just to be able to listen to internet radio or be connected to irc (which has no use of push not's at all) while I'm doing other things?
I agree that simplicity and security should prioritized, but there's a limit as to when security concerns are more important than usability.

There's no inherent problem with enabling system wide background processes in relation to security, the app store review process would be a filter to keep malware and viruses out to a good enough extent.

I agree with the suggestion that backgrounding would be done through a exposé fashion, double click the home button and all your running apps would be displayed or dislpayed in a way that you can easily browse through the running apps, an X in the top right corner would terminate the app fully.

I rather not go down the Android route since the OS isn't the least bit interesting to me, but I really can't understand why a user toggleable multitasking would be a bad thing for ppl, we already get to choose if we want the phone to use 3G and location services to save/deplete battery, why not one more option?

When I say the same time I don't mean that literally. I mean it's active.

I don't care what you think, or what you somehow think. This is what people want, and until the iPhone gets it people will continue to say the iPhone doesn't have multi-tasking. And they'd be right. The most common complaint is you can't listen to internet radio while using another app. Personally I'm not a big net radio listener, but a lot of people are.

Of course I know that.

What I doubt is that untrusted app-store applications are going to get the ability to run in background. The device and the OS are obviously capable of doing that. But Apple prevents it for very sound technical reasons.

But that does not mean Apple will not facilitate multi-tasking in the popular sense.

C.